Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony: The World Order Since 1500

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Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony This timely book provides a general overview of Great Power politics and world order from 1500 to the present. Jeremy Black provides several historical case studies, each of which throws light on both the power in question and the international system of the period, and how it had developed from the preceding period. The point of departure for this book is Paul Kennedy’s 1988 masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. That iconic book, with its enviable mastery of the sources and its skilful integration of political, military and economic history, was a great success when it appeared and has justifiably remained important since. Written during the Cold War, however, Kennedy’s study was very much of its time in its consideration of the Great Powers in ‘Western’ terms, and its emphasis on economics. This book brings together strategic studies, international relations, military history and geopolitics to answer some of the contemporary questions left open by Professor Kennedy’s great work and also looks to the future of great power relations and of US hegemony. Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony will be of great interest to students of international relations, strategic studies and international history. Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A world-renowed authority in history and archives, he is the author of seventy books, including The British Seaborne Empire, Rethinking Military History and Introduction to Global Military History.

War, History and Politics Series Editor: Jeremy Black Trade, Empire and British Foreign Policy, 1689–1815 Politics of a commercial state Jeremy Black Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies Military service in France and Germany, 1789–1830 Thomas Hippler America, War and Power Defining the state, 1775–2005 Lawrence Sondhaus and A.James Fuller (eds) Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony The world order since 1500 Jeremy Black

Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony The world order since 1500

Jeremy Black

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2008 Jeremy Black All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Black, Jeremy. Quest for power: the world order since 1500/Jeremy Black. p. cm.—(War, history and politics series) 1. History, Modern—Case studies. 2. Military history, Modern—Case studies. 3. Economic history—Case studies. 4. Balance of power—Case studies. I. Title. D210.B53 2007 909.08–dc22 2007011992 ISBN 0-203-93889-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 10: 0-415-39579-8 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-415-39580-1 (pbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-93889-5 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-39579-3 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-39580-9 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-93889-8 (ebk)

For Geoff and Lisa Thould

Contents Preface

1 Introduction: the Kennedy thesis considered

ix

1

2 Bids for mastery, 1500–90

23

3 Seventeenth-century crises, 1590–1680

44

4 The rise of the great powers, 1680–1774

60

5 A reshaped world, 1775–1860

75

6 Accelerated change, 1860–1913

98

7 Bids for power, 1914–42

116

8 The fall of empires, 1943–91

135

9 American hegemony, 1991–2007?

169

10 Into the future

187

11 Conclusions

198

Notes

202

Selected further reading

224

Index

226

Preface The point of departure for this book is Paul Kennedy’s 1987 masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. This book, with its enviable command of the literature and its ambitious and skilful integration of political, military and economic history, was a great success when it appeared and has justifiably remained important since. It is a tribute to Kennedy’s very positive role that other writing on the subject is in the shadow of his work. Shadows, however, lengthen, and it can be asked whether a re-examination is in order. The following book, which seeks to cover some of the same ground, offering a different interpretation and therefore in part serving as a response, is restricted to a size far shorter than that of Kennedy. I can only therefore take re-examination so far, but it is pertinent to revisit his theme. In part, this is because Kennedy was writing during the Cold War, and the geopolitical situation has changed since in a way in particular that invites a reconsideration both of his treatment of the Cold War and of his concluding chapter ‘To the Twenty-First Century’. Two methodological and conceptual aspects of Kennedy’s book, moreover, invite a more profound reconsideration: first, the treatment of the nonWestern world; second, the relationship between power and economics; and, more specifically, the danger that they will be treated in a reductionist fashion. Each aspect is considered in Chapter 1. A different approach is proposed in this book. Rather than searching for a unitary model for the definition and fate of great powers, as Kennedy is inclined to do, it is more appropriate to stress specific factors particular to each period and great power, and, as a related point, to emphasize the fortuitous nature of the rise and fall of individual great powers. In this, the response to particular conjunctures was crucial, and it is important not to assume that there was any inevitability in this response. This, in turn, directs attention to the quality of political leadership within what is referred to as the strategic culture of a particular state. If, as Kennedy argues, imperial overstretch was a key problem, and one that helped lead to the fall of great powers, it is important to consider whether this was a structural feature, or more one very much dependent on circumstances including the quality of leadership. Clearly, only so much can be covered within the allocated space, but hopefully this book will serve as a useful introduction and be of value to general readers and students as well as to subject specialists. Originally entitled Quest for Power: The World Order Since 1500, it seeks to draw attention to the variety of types of power and the different drives involved. While thinking about and writing this book, I have benefited from the opportunities to speak at Florida State and Ohio State universities, at Adelphi and Boston universities, at the University of the South, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, at Winchester College, at a conference on challenges to the nation-state organized by the New Criterion, at the Oxford Conference in Education, 2007, and at a conference on leadership in a revolutionary age organized by the Mendoza College of Business of the University of

Notre Dame in 2007. Gábor Agoston, Virginia Aksan, Roger Burt, John France, Jan Glete, Richard Hamilton, Peter Hoffenberg, Colin Imber, Harald Kleinschmitt, Adrian Lewis, Stewart Lone, Peter Lorge, Tim May, Stephen Morillo, Thomas Otte, Peter Stachura, Dave Stone, Martin Thomas, William Thompson, John Vasquez, Everett Wheeler, Sam Williamson, H.P.Willmott, Peter Wilson and Don Yerxa kindly commented on sections of a draft. I would like to thank Liz O’Donnell for her speedy and effective copy-editing. I have also profited greatly from discussing the topic with Charles Aldington, Ian Beckett, Tim Black, Daniel Branch, Guy Chet, Arthur Eckstein, Henry Kamen, Jack Levy, Mark Overton, Michael Pavkovic, Tim Rees and Jon Sumida. Opinions differ, not least among those who have kindly taken the time to read or discuss my work, and this difference reflects the continuing fascination and relevance of the past. Given the misleading tendency of some critics to personalize historiographical issues, I mention for the record that Paul Kennedy is widely regarded as a courteous and pleasant individual as well as a first-rate scholar, and that I have certainly found him so, not least in his friendly response to this project. It is a great pleasure to dedicate this book to two good friends, who are wonderful fun, splendid hosts and great companions on Dartmoor walks.

1 Introduction The Kennedy thesis considered This chapter sets out to reconsider, from a global and cultural perspective, the ‘rise and fall of great powers’, especially Paul Kennedy’s formulation of that topic in 1987. The major and continuing impact of his book ensures that discussion of it is still relevant, while its connection with other general assumptions permeating Western scholarship is also significant. Kennedy’s emphasis was on the dependent relationship between economic strength and mobilization and great-power status, as well as on the changing nature of economic strength and its consequences for capability and success as a power. He also discussed the extent to which policy choices, specifically strategic overreach, can weaken the economic base of great powers. My emphasis in this book, in contrast, is on the limits and problems of a materialist perspective on great powers, with its focus on the cost and affordability of greatness. There is also, in this book, discussion of the insights and benefits, instead, to be gained from bringing culture into the perspective. One conclusion such a perspective leads to is that a great power is perhaps best defined as a power (of some sort) that people at the time thought was great, that is, thought needed to be taken into account seriously in policy-making. From that perspective, it is hard, for example, not to call the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire a great power in 1550 and for a long time afterwards, no matter what our current view on how it fits in with materialist theories about great powers. In short, the relationship between ends and means is not seen here in the necessarily close and quasi-mechanical terms proposed and deployed by Kennedy. The perspective here is important because such a reconsideration leads to different historical interpretations, as well as views on policy and understandings of the modern world. Presentism, or an overly strong focus on current issues, is a problem for all historical analysis, the more so in considering long-term developments. To argue now that an analysis of world power and a discussion of great powers, however defined, has to take more note of non-Western societies and states than was the case with Kennedy’s book, might seem to be particularly a matter of current concerns. Indeed, it could almost be seen as a product of the decline of the Western empires and of Europe, but also, in the shorter term, as a consequence of the crises that affected American power in the 2000s as the confidence brought by the end of the Cold War was tarnished. Thus, to call for attention to China, South Asia and the Islamic world could very much be located in terms of the issues and anxieties of the 2000s. That might well be the case as far as the discussion of the present situation is concerned, but there is also a good case to be made for a re-examination of our discussion of past great powers. In particular, there is a tendency among some Western commentators to advance a definition of ‘great powers’ that restricts the subsequent list

Great powers and the quest for hegemony

2

to Western states. This provides a good structure for a book, but is much less secure in its explanatory value. This is a problem with the Kennedy analysis, and one that is compounded by his linkage of power status with economic strength, with the latter seen in terms of modern industrial and financial power. As a consequence, non-Western states apparently only merit attention if they meet Western definitions in these terms. Moreover, for many, the international relations history of Western states is the history of international relations. Thus, traditional diplomatic history looked only at the functioning of the elements of a particular power system. Japan, and then China, in the twentieth century were considered, but their earlier history was ruled out. This is problematic, both methodologically and empirically, and each point will be considered in the book. China from 1680 to the close of the eighteenth century is the most serious anomaly in the standard Western-centric approach. During that period, China, having been conquered in the mid-seventeenth century by the Manchu, not only made major territorial gains at the expense of non-Western states, especially Tibet and the Xinjiang-based Zunghar Confederation,1 but also drove the Dutch from Taiwan and the Russians from the Amur valley. The large quantities of silver brought by Western traders to Canton in order to purchase Chinese goods was another sign of Chinese strength; although it also led to inflation. In addition to China, it is apparent that there are problems with Paul Kennedy’s treatment of alleged conservatism in the Muslim world, specifically the early-modern Ottoman (Turkish) and Mughal (Indian) empires, and the supposed responsibility of this conservatism for a failure to keep up with Western military technology.2 This then leads to their being treated as redundant and as not worthy of attention until they were subject to Western power. After dismissing the non-Western powers at the start of his book, Kennedy, moreover, failed to return to consider them until the late nineteenth century. There are no references to China between pages 28 and 191 and none to Japan between pages 28 and 265. Not only did Kennedy fail to consider these powers in their own right, but he also neglected them in a comparative context. So China was not discussed alongside Spain for the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the subsequent recovery. The neglect of China is of a pattern with that of Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) in most works on history between 500 and 1500, not least military history. Just as the Mongols were a great power in the thirteenth century (see pp. 30–2), so there can be no doubt that by any absolute measure of power, China, Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey were great powers for all or most of the period 1500–1750, and Safavid Persia can be seen as nearly as strong. Indeed, the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and Uzbek empires can be seen as a key development of the sixteenth century that filled the void in much of the Islamic world left by Mongol failure and collapse.3 Kennedy, however, is concerned with the competition among great powers. It can be argued that this offers a relative dimension that justified a focus on Western powers, as in Europe the great powers faced potential or real existential threats from one another, and so the means by which they responded to those threats had true salience. In comparison, it can be argued that China had no power worthy of the name with which to measure or compare itself, much less compete, and that a power is great in some senses only by comparison and in competition with other powers, something that European powers had and non-European powers lacked. Eurocentrism may thus be the result if we wish to compare how great powers responded to great-power challenges.

Introduction

3

This, however, is misleading. Aside from the questionable relegation of the Manchu and, even more, Zhungar assailants of China, the conflicts of Mughals with Safavids, Safavids with Ottomans and Ottomans with Habsburgs suggest that a competitive states system was far from restricted to Christian Europe. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, indeed, is not only Eurocentric, but in need, like much other scholarship, of fundamental revision in terms of recent work on the East—West divide.4 It could be argued in response that the Chinese were strong as an agrarian empire in an age in which that type of strength was becoming passé, as the nineteenth century was to demonstrate; but such a teleological argument is a questionable way to address earlier periods. To a degree, moreover, China had fitted the navalist mode in the Southern Sung period, just prior to the coming of the Mongols, although it failed fully to recover this initial lead. If the neglect of China in particular raises questions relating to the role of ‘Orientalist’ assumptions about the superiority of the West in the discussion of the great powers by Kennedy and others, any concern with China conversely punctures the idea of the rise and fall of such powers in some unitary sequence set by Western power; while China also offers the possibility that any theory of ‘great power’ status should allow for rise, fall and rise again. This unitary sequence is commonly employed not only as a way to give narrative shape to the past, with designations of periods in terms, for example, of the rise of British power or the age of American hegemony, but is also used as an analytical method. This is particularly so with the concept of a paradigm power which allegedly serves both as a source of example and emulation for contemporaries and as a key for scholarly examination.5 Instead of the usual suspects, however, it is necessary to move beyond Western concern with maritime range and naval strength. This concern was very much that of Kennedy. His important early study on The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) encouraged him to adopt a navalist approach to power and also reflected his identification of military with economic strength. This identification is particularly apparent with naval power, as fleets require an infrastructure that is a product and cause of economic strength. It is no accident, therefore, that navalists tend to emphasize economic strength6 and technological proficiency. This reflects the extent to which they adopt an industrial approach to maritime power, stressing the value of battle fleets and the industrial capability that underpinned them. In doing so, however, there is a tendency to offer a questionable reading from naval to military history and also to devote insufficient attention to other types of naval strength and the accompanying infrastructure, for example to privateering. Privateering may be a relatively weak strategy pursued when one does not possess a strong ‘blue water’ fleet or is unprepared to risk losing such a fleet, and a focus on privateering may be a strategy that makes a serious dent in enemy commerce but that cannot serve as a winning method, but that does not mean, in contrast, that battle fleets are necessarily an essentialist, primary form of naval policy. Moreover, there is a marked tendency in navalist work to neglect Chinese and Islamic naval activity. The sea, particularly the deep sea, also, in marked contrast to the land, apparently provides a perfect example of a military environment in which Western analytic models can be readily applied. The conventional Western approach assumes a clear paradigm of military excellence, as well as an obvious means by which capability is to be ranked: in terms of the quality and quantity of resources applied in accordance with an effective

Great powers and the quest for hegemony

4

doctrine and organization. In short, a culturally denuded world is seen as an isotropic surface with unvarying characteristics, an account, however misleading, that may seem plausible to navalists and air-power enthusiasts, but one that is unsuited to power on land. A concern with maritime strength can be regarded not as navalism but rather as an appreciation for the growing significance of naval power in global politics over the last millennium. However, too much emphasis on such power may obscure what does go on on land. A navalist approach overtly underpinned The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, helping to ensure an emphasis on the accustomed list of great powers, particularly Britain and the USA. Indeed, reprising the late nineteenth-century discussion of naval history by Alfred Thayer Mahan, especially his The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660– 1783 (1890), the whole edifice essentially rested on an analysis of Britain and its application to the USA. In turn, this, and, more generally, the familiar cast, encouraged the extensive and very positive reception Kennedy’s book received, a reception that also reflected American concern about decline7 and the presentation and predictions of the concluding section, predictions taken forward in his Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (1993). George Orwell’s comment about the work of the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart, that a theory does not gain ground unless material conditions favour it,8 seems relevant for the response to Kennedy’s Rise and Fall, at least given the strength of American anxiety about decline. Rise and Fall was also influential in a number of important collections, for example, The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oxford, 1994) edited by Geir Lundestad, the Norwegian Nobel Institute director, based on a colloquium he had convened the previous year. Rise and Fall continues to be favourably regarded, remains a key text on a large number of courses and also influences work on other periods.9 Although written during the Cold War, the problems facing the USA in the mid-2000s made Kennedy’s predictions appear particularly pertinent to some commentators, one writer suggesting in 2006 that his ‘1987 predictions are becoming better substantiated with each passing year and administration’,10 a reference to the book’s argument about American overstretch. Overstretch as a consequence of overreach apparently provided a way to give historical background to America’s position. Paul Kennedy indeed has suggested that the reissue, in early 2007, by the Chinese Foreign Ministry of a new edition of the Chinese version, combined with the screening, on Chinese public television, of a popular twelve-part series on the ‘Rise and Fall of Great Powers’ stressing the role of navies in the rise of great nations, is linked to current Chinese naval expansion plans.11 Overstretch is, however, a problematic concept in that it presupposes a correct measure of reach (see pp. 37–8), sidesteps the point that every empire can be seen as suffering from overreach and is also not easy to apply in particular cases. For example, alongside the thesis that the Roman Empire fell because of such overstretch, it can be argued that the key issue, instead, was a dramatically worsening set of challenges or threat environment. The rise of Sassanid Persia in the mid-third century AD put pressure on the eastern Roman Empire, the basis of what became Byzantium, while the increased size of German tribal groupings on the Rhine and the Danube after AD 200, in part caused by agricultural advances and increased wealth in the Germanic aristocracy, ensured more serious challenges from the north, a situation made more acute after 370 by the Huns.12 The extent to which it was not possible to accommodate the new threats through acculturation was also serious. Such points about the complex relationship

Introduction

5

between overstretch and threat environment can be transposed to more recent cases, although it is necessary not to underplay the specificity of particular historical episodes. There is also the question, profitably addressed by Kennedy, of the impact of economic development and, more specifically, oceanic trade and large-scale industrialization, on relative political and military power. A literary parallel is interesting, as, in science fiction, long-distance interplanetary or interstellar trade is frequently a key indicator of power status. Although, on Earth, there were indeed major advantages in being the prime oceanic power, an emphasis on such an economic basis for military power risks both underrating other definitions of relative strength and also treating the signs of a global maritime economy as if they are an indication that prominence within this economy clearly established relative power. While an emphasis on oceanic trade is attractive for analytical purposes, it exaggerates the extent to which long-range trade was the crucial enabler of relative power, certainly prior to the nineteenth century, and thus that maritime strength was a key yardstick of an ability to derive economic benefit from trade. Trade has been definitely a crucial source of liquidity that could otherwise only be readily obtained for economic development by means of government action and control. The latter, in contrast, has been less efficient in economic terms and also led to more authoritarian governments, but this alternative was not incompatible with power. Indeed, the determination and efficiency of their military—fiscal extraction system could make up for limited resources.13 An emphasis on navalism had little application to antiquity, albeit with the prominent exception of fifth-century BC Athens. The great powers of antiquity were predominantly land-based, and, after the Iron Age, ancient empires did not really depend on technological progress. Maritime empires were to be the creation of states with Atlantic seaboards and not a necessary ingredient of great-power status. Until the nineteenth century, the European maritime empires in Asia, for example, were primarily institutions for the import of luxury goods, such as spices, into Europe. Only in the nineteenth century did they become large-scale territorial empires. There is a geopolitical duality of land and sea powers, with the latter having an advantage operating in global politics over long distances, while the former may have an advantage in regional politics close to their home bases; but this contrast was of little weight prior to the sixteenth century. More generally, naval strength was, in part, a matter of different priorities rather than material factors. In other words, far from necessarily reflecting simply the development of the economy, such strength was also the product of decisions about likely challenges and how best to respond to them. This can be seen by contrasting changing American and German force structures in the nineteenth century (see pp. 132–5). Linked to this is the suggestion that the concepts of what a great power is and of how states behave have been overdetermined, or simplified, by Kennedy and others. This was a process eased by the fact that Kennedy, like so many writers, relied on what Richard Hamilton terms ‘Truth by Declaration’,14 a process symbolized by his use of capitals for Great Powers. It is easy to understand why this argument by assertion is the case. To cover the subject, and indeed many historical topics, at sufficient depth, providing chronological precision to test the thematic generalizations within specific conjunctures, would have required a level of knowledge too great for any one individual. Yet, had there, instead, been either a collective work providing such knowledge, or an individual

Great powers and the quest for hegemony

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work with more qualifications and caveats, it would have been necessary to produce a book that was far longer than that by Kennedy, and it is far from clear that the exigencies of publishing economics makes this possible. In any case, collective volumes tend to lack a clear explanatory thrust, because the contributors usually have different ideas. Ironically, the major growth in the Asian economies that Kennedy only partly predicted makes publishing problems more of an issue because the price of paper has markedly increased as a result of demand for packaging and newsprint. This then creates a problem as to how best to proceed. Popular interest requires the clarity of narrative and analytical thrust provided by Kennedy, not least in order to justify the commercial decisions of length and attractive pricing, decisions that conspicuously were not addressed by the reviewers. In scholarly terms, however, it is better to offer a more indeterminate approach, one in which the assertions of clear-cut causal links are replaced by a more cautious noting of the complexity of circumstances and relationships. For example, the concept of ‘great power’ has been generally standardized for analytical purposes when, instead, it is far more helpful to think in terms of shifting meanings, not least meanings that were relative to particular contexts. Great powers, in short, were those recognized by others in this role. This was a recognition that helped advance norms for the relevant international system,15 but, at any one time, there were different and contrasting definitions of power. This was true both within specific state systems, which themselves varied greatly in size and type, and also, more generally, not least between competing state systems. Kennedy was writing about great powers, not empires, but the analogous definitional problems of the latter are instructive. For example, in a well-received recent collection, empire is defined as: a state established by conquest that has sovereignty over subcontinental or continental-sized territories and incorporates millions or tens of millions of people within a unified and centralised administrative system. The state supports itself through a system of tribute or direct taxation of its component parts and maintains a large permanent military force to protect its marked frontiers and preserve internal order. There is also an account of secondary or mimicking shadow empires, including maritime trade empires, which are held to be inherently weaker.16 This approach, however, is problematic, for it is not clear that there is an essential or primary state of imperial power, and the same can be argued for being a great power insofar as it is different. It has, for example, been claimed that ‘population is the sine qua non for great-power status’,17 but that underplays the extent to which the military and economic dimensions of labour can be obtained through cooperation and purchase within alliance systems. As a consequence of the role of perception and differing definitions of power, the precision offered by analysts who provide measures of power and measure great powers, sometimes indeed in terms of models with prescriptive mathematical conclusions, is ahistorical and inappropriate.18 This is the case not only as a guide to the attitudes of the past but also to the more specific issue of the extent to which these attitudes were themselves constitutive of great-power status. Analytical models do not explain why certain powers saw themselves, and were seen, as great powers. There are, for example,

Introduction

7

no obvious differences in policy between ‘great’ and lesser powers. Risk-taking can threaten each, while ideological factors can be as important for both in explaining assumptions and activity. They were important to resource mobilization, as with the Soviet Union in the Second World War and with North Vietnam from the 1950s to the 1970s. Furthermore, it is mistaken to assume that there was necessarily a materialist underpinning to ideological factors or to contemporary perceptions. Instead, both may turn on the choices of particular moments and, thus, be as prone to counterfactuals as the more usual topics of war and dynastic chance. A major recent study of the development of the New World concluded that ‘behind the cultural values and the economic and social imperatives that shaped the British and Spanish empires of the Atlantic world lay a host of personal choices and the unpredictable consequences of unforeseen events’.19 There is no reason to believe that the same was not the case for other great powers, not least when they were competing. The role of such choices and events in the long term is complex. They may not be the main drivers of the long term, but choices and events may mediate the consequences of these drivers. This approach is a major departure from the materialist conception of great powers and the assumption of a relationship between such powers and economic developments that play such a large role in the literature,20 not least in Kennedy’s work. The ‘underpinnings of power’ was his helpful phrase.21 Large-scale resources, not least the major economic capability that sustained conflict, are, indeed, important, and Kennedy and others understandably make considerable play with them. These resources could also grip the imagination, as with the presentation of industrialization in Britain in the late eighteenth century, for example, in paintings, most strikingly by Philip James de Loutherbourg, of the ironworks at Coalbrookdale, with the night illuminated by flaming furnaces. Power was readily suggested, and it impressed. The journalist William Cobbett wrote from Sheffield in England in January 1830: All the way along, from Leeds to Sheffield, it is coal and iron, and iron and coal… Nothing can be conceived more grand or more terrific than the yellow waves of fire that incessantly issue from the top of these furnaces…it is impossible to behold it without being convinced that …other nations…will never equal England with regard to things made of iron and steel. Kennedy grew up in Tyneside, the centre of English shipbuilding, where the link of industrial to military power was readily and dramatically suggested in the launch of warships. Having myself witnessed such a launch while I lived in Newcastle, I can appreciate their hold on the imagination. In essence, Kennedy’s argument was that there is a correlation between economic and technological trends and the given international balance; and that economic capability and productivity, and the capacity to generate revenues, are key ingredients of military power which, in turn, is the necessary foundation of states as great powers. Kennedy was willing to suggest that other factors also mattered: geography, national morale, military organization and even individual action, although here only in the case of a particularly foolish decision and policy, especially in the shape of encouraging imperial overreach. Ultimately, although a harsh

Great powers and the quest for hegemony

8

critic might suggest that Kennedy wished to have it both ways—stressing the economic under-pinnings of great-power politics and yet also arguing that other factors mattered whenever it suits his overall argument and when economic facts point the other way—he tended to come back to the longer-term forces profondes, and, to him, that meant primarily economic forces. This tendency towards explanation by system was at least consistent, being the essential approach of nineteenth-century thinkers who believed that the ‘laws’ of the natural scientists could be duplicated in the humanities, but this political-science approach was, and is, gravely flawed. For example, as Anthony Giddens pointed out, in his review of Rise and Fall, ‘there is virtually no mention of clashes between competing cultures and ideologies’ in the book.22 Moreover, these ideologies could contribute to commitment and resource mobilization, ensuring that power was far more intense in its application than materialist approaches are apt to suggest. Aside from resources defining and sustaining strength, power, in the material conception, was also designed to seize resources. The acquisition of land and labour, the two key inputs of production, were especially important in this sphere, although they could be by-products of conflict as much as its goal. This was true, for example, of much of the warfare in sub-Saharan Africa that fed the slave trade. Furthermore, China did not need to use its power to gain more labour. The quest for resources has been presented as important in nineteenth-century imperialism and, more generally, in modern warfare. The Boer War (1899–1902) is often seen as a classic instance of capitalist-driven empirebuilding, with British policy in southern Africa allegedly dominated by the gold and diamonds of the region. This parallels the argument that the interest of bondholders in Egyptian national debt lay behind British military intervention in Egypt in 1882 and that concern over nitrates played a key role in provoking the War of the Pacific (1879–83), and prefigures recent accusations about the role of oil (petroleum) in American policy towards the Middle East.23 These arguments, however, suffer from a tendency to homogenize or simplify policymakers, policy-making and policy and, correspondingly, to neglect or underrate the multiplicity of factors that affected policy. In each of the cases, issues of geopolitics and prestige were also important. Thus, for the British in Egypt in 1882, there was a concern about the security of the route to India, a route the geopolitics of which had been transformed by the recent opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,24 with changes accordingly for British strategic culture. Modern American policy in the Middle East is far more complex than might be suggested by an emphasis on oil, while the War of the Pacific was also more complex than a quest for nitrate and did not involve great powers. Industrialization not only produced resources. It also accentuated a Western tendency towards a utilitarian, measurement-based, outcome-oriented mentality. This had been seen with the rise of ‘political arithmetic’, the application of statistics in policy discussion, from the seventeenth century and became more pronounced in the nineteenth century. In his novel Hard Times (1854), set in Britain’s industrial heartland, Charles Dickens noted, ‘It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the [steam] engine will do’, while, in McAndrew’s Hymn, the British poet Rudyard Kipling referred to ‘Predestination in the stride o’ yon connection’-rod’. This looks towards the materialist reductionism seen in some scholarship, although, to underline the role of economics, it is

Introduction

9

difficult to deal with long-term international relations in the nineteenth century without bringing in steam engines. However, several caveats are required, even at the materialist level. First, Kennedy presented the ability to sustain a large-scale great-power conflict as the key definition of great-power status, but such conflicts are unusual while no ‘great power’ fought a largescale ‘great power’ conflict alone in the First or Second World War. It is far more common to fight limited wars, or, at the least, wars that are, from the perspective of the major power involved, limited wars. Kennedy argued, of the late nineteenth century, that ‘in an era of modern, industrialized warfare, the link between economics and strategy was becoming tighter’,25 but, for major economies, most modern wars have been far from total. The Vietnam War of 1963–73 was very much a limited one for the USA, even if it was very different for the states of South-East Asia that were the battleground. The USA, indeed, possessed the capability that Europeans had relative to the Far East in c. 1840–70 and to Africa in c. 1884–1914, in that they could wage what in effect was total war—and could destroy societies as constituted—without having to mobilize in the way that the term ‘total war’ came to mean in the first half of the twentieth century.26 Nevertheless, the USA was unsuccessful militarily and politically in Vietnam. The nature of alliances led by great powers is also open to discussion. Recent limited struggles have shown that the ability of great powers to lead allies is restricted, however much they may have supported them in economic, financial and military terms. This was driven home in 1991 and 2003 when Turkey refused to support the USA in the wars with Iraq by providing either troops or transit for American forces. Moreover, massive American aid to Israel did not leave the latter particularly responsive to American Middle East peace initiatives. More generally, the problems and commitments of lesser allies have often distorted the goals and policies of great powers, a case of the tail wagging the dog. Material support for hostile or neutral powers could be even less effective than that for lesser allies, as it frequently did not create a community of shared interest that affected policy choices. This was seen in the 1960s, when American food aid for Egypt did not prevent the animosity of the Nasser government to the USA. The same issue recurred with food aid for North Korea in the 2000s.27 The relationship between greatpower status, economic-military capability and being able to lead/persuade/coerce others is complex. To argue that the latter should not be a criterion of this status underrates its importance to international relations in both peace and war. As a second caveat at the materialist level, power and force are not the same, while success in wars is not necessarily the product of economic resources or of a variant thereof. Such an explanation of success has several flaws, including underrating the potential dynamic between events and goals, and thus the extent to which the latter can change. Instead, a resource-based approach is apt to downplay the role of goals, or, in military terms, tasks, and to treat the matter as an elemental struggle for total victory. As an example of the opposite, in the American Civil War (1861–5), the war goals of the Union (North) were up for debate and election in 1864, and, had Abraham Lincoln been defeated by George McClellan in the presidential election, then the Union might have been willing to offer the Confederacy (South) more moderate terms. This provided the Confederacy with a viable military goal—trying to create among Union public opinion a sense that the war was going badly, and this strategy had operational consequences, a goal encouraging offensives into the Union, which were designed to suggest that the

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Union could not win. In the event, in 1864, in large part because of Sherman’s success near Atlanta, the Confederate strategy failed. It was not, however, a strategy made unviable by superior Union resources, as might be assumed if the emphasis for the Civil War instead, as is frequently the case, is on the marked disparity in resources in favour of the Union, a position emphasized by those who adopt the materialist position. Other things being equal, the Union had a better probability of winning and the South was disadvantaged from the outset, but to argue that that made the eventual outcome likely ignores the political dimension as well as the role of contingency.28 Kennedy himself was not always consistent in his stress on economic factors. Having argued the importance of the state’s maintaining creditworthiness as the prerequisite for success in the conduct of eighteenth-century warfare, a point certainly true of Britain,29 he turned to geopolitics to explain how an economically backward and capital-poor Russia rose in power.30 This fluctuation between his nineteenth-century liberal approach and a Mackinderesque geopolitics was a not very convincing attempt to square the circle without being explicit about his approach. Moreover, as far as the French Revolutionary forces of the 1790s were concerned, Kennedy was willing to put weight on the role of the ideological zeal of the Revolutionaries and the disunity of their opponents, rather than on finance and commerce. In the case of Japan in the 1890s and 1900s, morale in the shape of a disciplined political culture of self-sacrifice was also seen by Kennedy as very important.31 More generally, on the whole, Kennedy argued that economic power allows for the acquisition of the necessary technologies that enable a state to maintain and equip an expanded military establishment which, in turn, is used to fight wars. He also argued that it is the wars that stimulated the economic growth and technological advances which then allowed states to rise to become great powers. This reciprocal causality, however, does not always explain differences in success between states. As a third caveat at the materialist level, wealth and other material determinants of power are important, but their importance depends on how they are applied. Organization and institutions matter, and so does culture. As an example of the importance of organizations, as well, however, as of the need for caution in adopting teleological approaches, it is possible to query Kennedy’s use of the case of France under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) to assert a ‘monopolization and bureaucratization of military power by the state, which in turn, was seen as a central part of “nation-building”’,32 both for France and, more generally, for Western states of the period. In practice, the extent of such monopolization and, even more, bureaucratization, generally seen as key features of the governmental absolutism of the period, can be questioned. In its place, the ethos of command can be related to dynastic and aristocratic prestige and connections, rather than modernistic notions of state and nation. It is, therefore, appropriate to emphasize the role of monarchical gloire, while assertions about the statist and centralizing goals and character of absolutism can be discarded from their customary place in the academic quiver.33 It is also worth noting that, in discussing Louis XIV, different emphases can be found in the recent specialist literature.34 This situation, which is more generally the case, seriously undermines Kennedy’s tendency to treat developments and issues as clear-cut, an aspect of the argument by assertion already mentioned (see p. 6). Culture as a constituent of power covers a wide range of characteristics and attitudes. In part, it relates directly to the question of what power means in a given context and

Introduction

11

opens up the possibility of discussing the religious, intellectual and cultural constituents of great-power status. This also directs attention to the issue of such power as arising from or operating in a manner that is focused on non-material considerations. Religious power is a key instance, but it is also interesting to consider Greek domination of Classical thought and language, a domination operating through its influence in the Roman Empire. This approach would define great-power status in part in terms of a capacity for the spread of attitudes and values. Cultural factors also greatly affect the material sphere, and this highlights several of the contradictions in Kennedy’s argument, as an emphasis on material considerations needs to be contextualized with reference to the cultural issues involved in their understanding, use and effectiveness. Fourth, the provision of resources in conflicts is not an automatic consequence of capability but, instead, in part, reflects the willingness to support goals. The parameters and nature of the willingness to support goals varies, but public opinion is a potent factor even in autocratic regimes. This ensures that powers, whether great or otherwise, have to be considered in part in terms of their capacity to elicit consent and to avoid dissent. This capacity is a multilayered one, embracing, for example, the terms of agglomeration seen with composite states, a situation which is true of most empires. Furthermore, the practice of agglomeration may be different to the terms of the combination, and this can lead to a tension between competing interests and among varied goals, as with Charles V’s Habsburg Empire in the early 1550s and also the Burgundian and Spanish cores of the empire of his son, Philip II, later in the decade.35 As an extension of this, it is necessary to see international coalitions in part in terms of the issues of eliciting consent and cooperation. Allies are not necessarily friends, and conflicting interests are with difficulty brought and held together by being persuaded of a common need. If this approach is extended to the domestic sphere, and the search for backing there when raising resources,36 then materialist conceptions of power indeed take on part of the characteristics of political history. The latter, moreover, have to be understood in the widest terms to include the political dynamics and consequences of social relations. The economic sphere also involves alliances, as management, government, consumers, investors and labour all possess agency. Furthermore, they interact in a shifting fashion in which material considerations are not the sole factor.37 Lastly, as far as cooperation is concerned, it is important to note that this is also a case of cooperation, coordination, and consent within government. Looked at differently, the pursuit of goals and tasking requires cooperation between various branches of government, and it is frequently difficult to secure this cooperation because there are no clear structural relationships or patterns of agreement between these branches. In the case of the military, this can be seen in the repeated deficiencies of joint planning. Indeed, clashes between army, navy and airforce views make the military dimension of the longterm assumptions described as strategic culture far more shifting and tentative than the term might suggest. Kennedy, however, tended to underplay the autonomy of the military. This aspect of cooperation can be taken further beyond the military, if other branches of government, such as finance and diplomacy, have to be included. These caveats are not points dependent on a particular stage in material ‘progress’ and also serve as a reminder of the extent to which great powers are not uniquely different polities to lesser powers. There are, however, contrasts in circumstances that are worth considering. Great powers may obsess about loss of position, while lesser powers worry

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more about survival. Some great powers can entertain ideologies of manifest destiny or regional hegemony, while lesser powers must be content to expand a bit here and there, although, as Serbian nationalists showed in the 1990s, that does not prevent them from having an ideology of manifest destiny. An emphasis on consent within the alliance structures and practices that contribute to power directs attention to the role of ideas, and here a typology can be offered that is the opposite of materialist. Some states have an ideology in which obedience is owed to a leadership that is deistic or semi-deistic, while others accept a different situation, sometimes extending to recognizing the formal legitimacy of opposition. The former might today be treated as anachronistic, but twentieth-century ideologies and political practices, in fact, threw up similar situations, and future ones may continue to do so. More generally, it is not obvious how best to assess ready consent, or, at least, accepting the caveat on p. 13, ostensible consent, as a constituent aspect of strength, but it is unclear why such consent should necessarily take a far smaller role than material factors. This, indeed, can be seen in past analyses of states in which commentators saw domestic regeneration as entailing not solely improvements in material factors but also processes of political, social and ideological renewal. These analyses have been strident in the case of revolutionary regimes with messianic ideologies, such as the China of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, with its determination to purge the Communist Party and government, but are also readily apparent in the content and vocabulary of democratic politics, for example, in the early twentieth century, with tariff reform in Britain, Progressivism in the USA and anti-clericalism in France. This, again, is a reminder of the multiple perceptions of strength and weakness and, therefore, of the number of possible narratives that can be followed in assessing the rise and fall of great powers. Indeed, Kennedy argued the case for a type of American regeneration from 1988 through a better understanding of the circumstances of national power combined with a policy of raising taxation.38 Ideologies also play a more direct role in foreign policies in the shape of strategic cultures. These vary with reference to a range of factors, but ideas cannot be taken out of the equation. This is particularly seen with the choice between ‘accommodationist’ strategies and those that were more assertive.39 W.W.Rostow’s critique of Rise and Fall in part rested on the role of convictions in leading Britain to fight Germany in 1939 and to fight on when defeated in 1940.40 The ideological framework of relations between state and society can also be seen as crucial to the success and failure of states competing and warring across cultural divides.41 A belief in great-power status, traditionally expressed in terms of imperial identity and pretensions, provided a crucial means to strengthen the legitimacy of states. This was not simply a matter of anachronistic past values focused on dynasticism and sacral kingship but was also the case with more ‘modern’ recent great powers, such as Britain, the USA, the Soviet Union and China over the past century, with the great-power status seen as serving idealist goals as well as realist needs, and the former proving crucial to legitimacy. Returning to materialist factors, Kennedy devoted considerable attention to the idea that expenditure on the military can be counterproductive. He saw this so in a number of ways, most arrestingly with reference to his reiterated theme of strategic overreach as powers take on excessive burdens, which is a sophisticated variant on the more frequent

Introduction

13

view of war as a solvent of power and control.42 The argument about overreach helped make the book a best-seller during the 1988 American presidential campaign, not least because it offered a critique of Ronald Reagan’s recent defence build-up. More generally, overspending on security was seen by Kennedy as undermining security by causing structural problems due to a weakening of the productive investment necessary for sustaining a developing economy. The later period of the Soviet Union probably best fits this analysis, certainly more so than the contemporaneous USA of the Cold War to which Kennedy applied his model. The idea, indeed, was another aspect of Kennedy’s debt to nineteenth-century British liberalism. War then was seen as a bad thing that reflects the failure of free trade to eliminate frictions between people: homo economicus will not fight for such non-rational beliefs as nationalism and ideology—beliefs and drives which Kennedy tended to underplay, if not ignore. Kennedy’s recent book on the United Nations reflects this approach. However, rather than assuming a clash, military expansion and economic development were frequently closely linked, as in the Second World War when the American economy grew substantially at the same time that the USA invested in becoming a leading military power. This suggests that Kennedy’s model only applies in exceptional circumstances. Hitler was worried by American economic power, although until 1940 little of it was invested in the military. To take the case of Russia, Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) deliberately promoted industry, particularly metallurgy in the Urals, to provide military power and did not see them as separable; indeed, the opposite. As with later Soviet figures, statistics are unreliable, but industrial production definitely increased, for example, of cannon. Peter, however, did not see military capability simply in terms of production. He also sought a profound cultural change in the Russian elite, one that focused on education and service. He founded artillery (1701) and engineering (1709) schools, which graduated 300–400 officers annually, while officers were trained by service as ordinary soldiers in the guards regiments. His attempt to make state service a central focus for the aspirations of many led to a Table of Ranks designed to link status with service and to the spread of uniforms, which were a mark both of service and of the state’s role in deciding and allocating rank. Similarly, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator from 1924 to 1953, saw industrialization and military security as so intertwined as to be generally not separable and also added the cultural element of ideological mobilization through socialism backed by terror as a central feature in a new society. In both cases, it is possible to argue that the more general stimulating impact on the economy was that of a type of defence Keynesianism or stimulus through deficit spending. Such expenditure clearly limited the investment possibilities for other sectors of the Russian and Soviet economies, and the 1933 famine can in part be blamed on grain stockpiling and railroad diversion in preparation for war. However, such a liberal conception about living standards meant little within the authoritarian political parameters and opportunistic and paranoid strategic cultures of each period in Russian history. Furthermore, this defence Keynesianism did bring important economic benefits to Russia. In some respects, authoritarian societies were partially immune from the types of detrimental trade-offs of expenditure on the military that Kennedy identified, just as they were not necessarily able to benefit from the more benign counterpart he outlined between economic growth and a stronger state.

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An emphasis on great power competition and the perspective of the international system would suggest that, for Imperial and Soviet Russia under Peter the Great and Stalin, there was a case of late developers having to try harder in order to catch up. This did not determine how they conceptualized their predicament or what strategy they adopted, but it does suggest that their approach was more likely to be all-encompassing with policy focused on catching up. However, while valuable, this analysis also underplays the autonomous role in setting policy of distinctive socio-political contexts. In the case of Imperial and Soviet Russia, as with China, there were costs in mass militarization. Conscripts had to be fed, clothed, housed and equipped, however poorly. There was also an opportunity cost to the individual conscripts, most of whom would have preferred to be doing something else, and an opportunity cost to society, which lost its productive labour. However, Imperial and Soviet conscripts alike were paid essentially nothing and so represented less burden than they otherwise might have. Moreover, Russia and the Soviet Union, like many Eurasian societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but unlike Britain and, even more, the USA, were characterized by a surfeit of unskilled labour and an overcrowded countryside. Taking unskilled eighteen-year-olds off the crowded land and out of a labour market characterized by too many illiterate peasants was not necessarily unhelpful, nor an aspect of overreach, while troops could be used for large-scale economic purposes, whether assisting with harvests or constructing public works, as in Communist China, especially in the 1950s. Furthermore, in Russia, as also, for example, in the Ottoman Empire, the military had vital internal policing duties irrespective of its ostensible purpose of fighting wars. These policing duties can be seen as a crucial aid to the economy, as they ensured a basic level of stability, including labour control.43 It is difficult, however, to build these policing duties into materialist assessments of strength. These duties tend to be ignored by navalists, who are not focused on how governments maintain imperial order in agrarian empires, but their criteria of military tasking is apt to be overly narrow due to its stress on international confrontation and conflict. Russia also provides an instructive demonstration of a major problem with materialist reductionism, namely, which set of data is to be employed. Kennedy, understandably, picked data that supported his argument. For example, in the 1830s and 1840s, Russia had the largest gross national product (GNP) in Europe, but this was downplayed by Kennedy because Russia was presented as being in longer-term decline, having the largest population (and thus a low per-capita GNP) and being an agricultural country.44 Fair enough, but similar caveats could be offered to other uses of data in the book. The same problem will emerge when China possesses the largest GNP later in the twenty-first century, as being in this situation does not mean that a country has the most power, although there are commentators who argue otherwise. Furthermore, as another instance of difficulties with data, insofar as production is involved, there are major contrasts in the sophistication of the processes involved, and this underlines the extent to which manufacturing value itself is an overly crude index. Russia’s role as a nineteenth-century power was demonstrated in the threat it was believed to pose to others, for example, long-standing British concerns about Russian expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and in Central Asia, culminating in the threat that Russia was seen to pose to the British position in South Asia. Kennedy found it difficult to engage with Russia. Its role in fighting the French, not least holding them in

Introduction

15

1807 more successfully than Austria and Prussia had done in 1805 and 1806 respectively, was downplayed, and, conceptually, Kennedy’s preference was very much for a different type of society, again a preference seen more generally among navalists. The argument that free competition, religious toleration and individual independence and initiative are vital ingredients in a state’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances and to harness them to its grand strategic objectives, and that centralization and conformity impede progress and, ultimately, lead to the downfall of a great power, is a sympathetic one. This argument also plays an influential role, for example, in the assertion that there was a distinctive Western Way of War, an argument that helps some modern American commentators to see their country as a latter-day Athens.45 As an historical explanation, however, this argument has only limited explicatory powers. This is particularly so if a ‘pick and mix’ approach is taken. For example, such factors may help explain the fall of the Soviet Union but are far less pertinent for Imperial Russia, which fell more due to the consequences of failure in war. Moreover, if in response to liberal criteria over-centralization is seen as a cause of decline, it needs to be considered why the Habsburgs are criticized by Kennedy for lacking the necessary centralization and seen as also suffering relative decline as a result.46 As an instance of the problems of determining what is to be analysed, freer societies may be better for changing policies that fail, but autocratic governments may find it easier to push through change, as with the recent history of China. Kennedy’s preferences help place his thought as combining elements of eighteenthcentury British stadial theories of social development (progress through stages of development) with nineteenth-century liberal views on economics in a historical materialism that appeared appropriate to writing about Britain and the USA. His liberal perspective, however, was less appropriate for Russia, and here the problem was, in part, the type of materialist account that was adopted. Aside from a sense that Russia could not be a great power because its economy was not liberal, there were specific problems in the assessment. For example, Kennedy’s emphasis on per-capita GNP, which reflects the quantity of goods brought to market and liberal economic views of the superiority of comparative advantage, is unhelpful, as per-capita GNP does not determine power. Until the 1990s, Russia’s economy was not capitalist, but it managed to produce sufficient material to underpin Russia’s military strength to the degree necessary to make Russia a great power. However good the Austrian, German or American armies, the sheer size of the Russian forces induced grave strategic concern. More generally, the amount of (not the means or efficiency of obtaining) production is significant, and it was not inherently inefficient that Russia focused on the strength of the state and not the wealth nor wellbeing of the individual. Kennedy was far from alone in adapting a materialist account of power politics and linking it to the rise and fall of powers. William Thompson, the most sophisticated political scientist recently to address long-range issues in power politics, has seen technology as key to Western power: Expansion in the size and discipline of armies eventually was accompanied by a full array of transformed military technology made possible by a series of industrial revolutions after the late eighteenth century. In support of these transformations, European states became

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more complex and powerful, their populations were transformed from subjects into citizens, and warfare moved towards the total involvement of citizen populations experienced in the two world wars. None of these developments was coincidental, but were the product of a co-evolutionary spiral in technology, organization, and warfare that transformed Europe in ways not experienced to the same extent by much of the rest of the world.47 This approach is a marked advance in the materialist approach, but, however, also leaves out issues of perception and culture. More specifically, there are problems in assuming any equivalence among modern, industrial and total wars. The transformations valuably discussed by Thompson helped lead to the last, but, by the 1990s, modern industrial warfare was far from total for the Western powers.48 Political science can also be ready to assume a standardized form of state behaviour, underplaying changing understandings of the meaning of power. Thus, John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) depicted a continual striving for advantage in the form of power, with this striving driving the behaviour of the great powers. This ‘offensive realism’ assumes that all great powers seek to maximize power all of the time, as opposed to ‘defensive realists’, who argue that all states seek to maximize security, and some classical realists, who suggest that it is some great powers that seek to maximize power, thus causing strife. The different ways in which advantage and power can be construed need to be given a central place in any interpretation, as also the role of political circumstances in affecting these perceptions. This can be seen in Kennedy’s treatment of British decline, a treatment which indicates that historical materialism is not the sole problem with his analysis. There was also an implicit teleology—account and analysis dominated by the eventual outcome—in his treatment of the 1870–1914 period, with everything pointing to a war with Germany because of shifts in the global balance of power. This approach overlooked the extent to which the transoceanic empire was far more important to British thinking in much of the period, with Germany appearing as far less significant as a challenger to this empire than France and Russia, from which long-standing challenges still appeared urgent at the turn of the nineteenth century. Moreover, co-operation and, from 1892, alliance between France and Russia ensured that Britain’s overall strategic position was much more precarious, both strategically and financially, in the 1880s and 1890s than in the later naval race with Germany, which indeed Britain won. The role of circumstances, perception, the dynamics of diplomacy and cultural influences are all pertinent. Although Anglo-German confrontation was probable in the long term, the line-up in 1914 could have worked out differently, ensuring that the competing alliances had very different resource bases (and possibly goals), which, on Kennedy’s assumptions, would presumably have led to a different outcome. There is also an implicit teleology in the assessment of inter-war Britain (1918–39). An emphasis on the economic and financial costs of the First World War, on industrial decline and on imperial overstretch, appears to explain—at least in part—the appeasement of the dictators in the 1930s,49 but does not really deal with the question of political choices by British policy-makers, while it has also been argued that Britain remained the preeminent world power, in part because ‘American power remained more

Introduction

17

potential than real’.50 Furthermore, if Germany could spend a high percentage of its GNP (more than Britain) on the war in 1918 and then, within two decades, re-emerge to challenge the other powers for supremacy in Europe, it is not clear why a structuralist and materialist approach should be taken for Britain, suggesting that it had become much weaker, or to Germany implying that it was bound to fail. Taking this further, the difficult financial state of Germany in 1939 might suggest that war was her sole option, and it can be argued that all Nazi policy was predicated on war as the outcome of policy and the solution to problems, but this still left the course of events unpredictable, including the attitudes of Hitler, for example, towards war in 1938 and 1939. Kennedy also tended to assume a deterministic approach to the interactions of powers. He argued that ancien régime France ‘could not prevail against the coalition which its ambitions inevitably aroused’,51 but, as the favourable response to French coalitionbuilding in 1670–2 or 1741 demonstrated, there was no such inevitability that such a hostile coalition would be formed. Far from counterbalancing real or potential hegemonic states, other powers could find it appropriate, necessary and/or helpful to ally with them, as again happened in 1756–62 when France became part of a large alliance system with Austria, Russia and, eventually, Spain, against the apparently weaker alliance of Britain and Prussia. There was also no inevitability in constraining France in 1792–1815, as the history of the period demonstrates. Instead, both Prussia and Spain abandoned the struggle with Revolutionary France in 1795, while Napoleon’s unnecessary unwillingness to permit others any independence undermined their earlier acceptance of his hegemony.52 Kennedy’s thesis, like those of other materialist approaches, explicitly offered a guide not only to the past but also to present and future, which exposed him to the (worthwhile) dangers of doing contemporary history. It is easy and tempting to present observations about the past as universal rules with a predictive quality. For example, the ‘fact’ that Britain succeeded because of its commercial wealth (a fact that itself requires qualification) can be presented as a rule that commercial success leads to military and diplomatic dominance. However, there are serious methodological flaws with this method. Furthermore, events have a way of making predictions wrong, although part of the rules with prediction is that the past can lead to wrong generalizations about the future. It is not assumed that prediction provides an authoritative guide. A different form of materialist approach is provided by an emphasis on geopolitics or geographical destiny. This presents interests as structural and can be employed for both international relations and warfare. For example, a discussion of Prussia (and later Germany) as ambitious to be a ‘great power’, yet surrounded by enemies can lead to the conclusion that it had to defeat its opponents rapidly before their combined pressure could be brought to bear, and this can be seen as affecting Prussian military thinking and planning, with attempts in 1866, 1870, 1914 and 1940 to bring quick victories. In contrast, in the case of the USA from 1898, there was a focus on strategy, arising from the central questions being where to go and where to stay. These were questions that reflected a choice between options, a choice that arose from America’s distance from the likely sphere of conflict. In this American approach, strategy, or what used to be called grand strategy, brought victory, whereas the Prussian emphasis was more operational, and insufficient care was devoted to grand strategy. Such geopolitical approaches are valuable but need to be located, like economic materialist ones, in an analytical system

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that allows both for an interacting and varying number of causes of policy, and for the agency of particular circumstances and policy-making elites. In considering materialist approaches, it is also worth noting the extent to which the emphasis within economic history has itself changed. The stress on ‘things’ has declined in favour of a greater emphasis on the cultural, social and political characteristics of growing economies. This is seen, in particular, in work on Britain’s rise, not least with a shift from a concern with canals, coal and cotton, towards one on mercantile capitalism.53 A focus on the latter provides another basis for the discussion of alliances already referred to. Kennedy’s emphasis, which accorded with the mercantilism of late seventeenth-century European commentators, reflected stress on production as an aspect of resource-based approaches to power, but economic history is now a subject in which attention has moved from production and in which consumption, political science and sociology all play a larger role. Turning to a different aspect of the cultural approach, it is also pertinent to underline the extent to which great powers are great because they wish to be so and are ready to focus their efforts accordingly, not least by shelving or otherwise resolving internal disagreements. A sense of national exceptionalism and mission is part both of the sense of power and of thinking on an imperial scale, as with twentieth-century France. Such a sense is an important element that cannot be analysed in materialist conceptions. This relates directly to the strength of nationalism, which great powers, indeed, are apt to underrate in the case of their weaker opponents. Conversely, when nationalism is put under great strain, which is one interpretation of French divisiveness and political culture in the late 1930s, then it becomes harder to act as a great power. This does not imply that France fell to German attack in 1940 because of internal crisis and moral weaknesses, as is sometimes argued. Such an interpretation dramatically underrates the military and international circumstances in 1940. However, the response to crisis under these heads, particularly to the success of the German offensive, was greatly affected by a wider political malaise that fed through into a crisis of confidence incompatible with greatpower status. Thus, a balance has to be struck in explaining France’s defeat in 1940. Internal weaknesses certainly made France more vulnerable in defeat.54 Belief in great-power status generally drew on a sense of exceptionalism that was presented in terms of alleged specific characteristics and also of a praiseworthy inheritance: for example, nineteenth-century Britain as the successor to Imperial Rome. This practice has been maintained by commentators who present the USA and, before it, Britain and, sometimes, before that the Dutch, in terms of a liberal tradition of effective maritime powers, whose success owed much to their liberalism.55 Another consequence of the quest for an uplifting past was the seizure of power symbols from other societies. For example, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–6, which was seen by its dictator, Benito Mussolini, as a key step in the creation of an empire that would emulate Classical Rome, led to the seizure of antiquities, including a granite obelisk from Aksum which was re-erected at a road junction in the city of Rome. Alongside an exemplary inheritance, the notion of a unified culture is also an important aspect of power. This is particularly the case with authoritarian regimes but is also relevant to their nonauthoritarian counterparts, although culture is then understood in terms of parameters including the rule of law and religious tolerance.

Introduction

19

In many countries, racist interpretations of identity helped provide a sense of states as operating with particular strengths and in distinctive fashions, with this identity a clear cause of relative strength. This extended to views of other societies, both hostile and allied. Racial self-confidence might be seriously flawed, as was shown in 1942 when British views about the Japanese were exposed as seriously inaccurate, with repeated British defeats, in particular in Malaya, Singapore and Burma, and also at sea and again with German assumptions in 1941–5 about the Soviets. Nevertheless, however flawed, such assumptions were an aspect of assessments of relative power. This is the case both with domestic and with international support for such assumptions. The degree to which this remains the case is unclear, but resonances include critical, if not hostile, American, Israeli and Iranian views of Arabs. Conversely, decline can occur when societies lose the willingness to act as great powers, as, arguably, happened with the United Provinces (modern Netherlands) in the eighteenth century, with Britain from the late 1950s and, as far as some, mostly American, critics are concerned, with a modern USA unwilling to bear the burdens and costs of great-power status and aspirations.56 One aspect of this in the case of Britain was a disenchantment with colonial rule. This disenchantment, however, was a reflection of Europe’s much reduced status and strength after the Second World War and is, therefore, also an indication of the extent to which attitudinal changes did not occur in a vacuum. Britain and the French had weakened themselves and their material resource base trying to be great powers, but a shift in attitudes was also crucial, not least, in the case of Britain, to a concern to spend far more money on social welfare in the metropole, combined with a changed view on the appropriateness of colonial rule. Disenchantment with colonial rule was widespread in the West in this period, although not in Portugal, which, otherwise, was a very minor power without a mission. Elsewhere, states were keen to continue rule of areas where the majority had a different view, most obviously Communist China in Tibet and India in the strategic region of Kashmir. This was an aspect of the new and fragile character of these states in the late 1940s and 1950s, although these policies were continued as the states became stronger. At a minor level, Argentina’s short-lived seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1982 was an attempt to gain territory in fulfillment of a supposed national mission as well as providing a populist prop for a military junta. The extent to which earlier colonial rule was normative in the West also opens up the question of how best to assess overseas territories when considering great-power status. Spain retained control of most of its extensive and New World empire until the Napoleonic invasion of the metropole (1808–13) was followed by colonial wars of independence, but, in the meantime, was not generally seen as one of the key European powers in the eighteenth century, not least because it generally accepted the status quo in Italy after mid-century. Nevertheless, Spain is an example of how many ‘declining states’ proved quite resilient. Spanish power on the American mainland, extinguished in 1826, outlasted that of Britain in what became the USA, although not in Canada. Moreover, the end of this Spanish presence should be seen as a major episode in the history of great powers, not least because it ended the prospect of Spanish resurgence and made it possible for first Britain and later the USA to become the dominant economic power in Latin America, a dominance that was an aspect of their informal empires.

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Employing Kennedy’s theory, it is difficult to explain why Austria, which he refers to as becoming a ‘marginal first-class power’57 (whatever that means) from the eighteenth century, survived for so long and continued to be regarded as a great power within Europe. In part, the treatment of Spain, Austria and other ‘declining’ or ‘rising’ powers was, and is, a matter of perception. Thus, great powers are great because they wish to be so and are regarded in this fashion. The latter may be seen as more significant, but the former is also important. For example, how powers cope with failure and defeat is also a crucial indicator and can be seen as a more useful measure of great-power status than the winning of wars. The ability to keep going and to react by taking necessary strengthening measures is a product of a range of factors that cannot be summarized in terms of material resources. This helps lead to a focus on issues of honour, status and prestige which can be important not only as precipitants of policy but also as affecting its basic thrust. Thus, financial overextension in the pursuit of goals was not simply a product of the availability of credit but also reflected the secondary role of financial considerations, a point pertinent for the Habsburg rulers of sixteenth-century Spain, but not only for them.58 Honour and prestige are a matter not simply of international perception but also of its domestic counterpart,59 and are related not only to support and perception but also to the self-image of policy-makers. This is important to how they analyse problems and consider responses, including resources.60 Such themes take the consideration of power into the cultural sphere61 and towards such issues as insecure and provoked masculinities. Although much else was involved, this approach may be particularly pertinent for ‘revisionist’ regimes unhappy with their current international position, such as those of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan in the 1930s, with the fanaticism of their ideologies in part explained in cultural terms.62 Without suggesting any equivalence, it is also relevant to discuss cultural factors in any general consideration of the determination to assert power and to rule. This determination, however, has different manifestations, as during the Second World War, when the USA sought power without empire, in contrast to Britain and France, both of which wished to preserve its empire, and, even more, the revisionists, Germany, Italy and Japan, each of which sought to extend greatly its empire.63 The emphasis on perception as a major factor in determining the identity of great powers can be matched with reference to the means by which powers interact. Use of the language of norms and of a standard analytical model suggests a high degree of predictability in this interaction, but, whatever the view of commentators, norms are, in practice, changeable and are very much moulded by political actors. This is brutally obvious in revolutionary contexts, when existing norms can be publicly rejected, but, at other times, there is a similar porosity about conventions of behaviour. This porosity is most pertinent for great powers because their range and commitments are likely to be most extensive. As a result, these powers are most likely to confront other interests whose views on norms are very different, just as their military practice may well be asymmetrical. These clashing views need to be taken into account when assessing the goals of states, because the perception of the states involved was an aspect of their power and effectiveness. Perception is not simply a method of analysis, therefore, but is also an aspect of power. As such, perception is far less fixed and quantifiable than readily apparent

Introduction

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material considerations, such as the number of troops or the production of pig iron. This helps undermine assessments of states based simply on such material considerations, and that underlines the problem of analysing power on a uniform basis. As a result, the capacity to understand the complexities of the strength and intentions of other states becomes necessary for countries and is, thus, an aspect of power. This is true not only of opponents but also of allies, with the assessment of the latter involving short-term factors, for example, what could be contributed in a particular conflict, as well as long-term considerations, such as gratitude and the inculcation of a sense of empathy.64 Structuralist interpretations, which see situations in terms of systems, tend to underrate the role of perception, but the latter is emphasized in specific analyses, especially those based on archival sources that cover the views of those involved,65 although it is necessary to give due weight to the limited range of the archival material for some states.66 Contemporary commentators are also apt to stress the extent to which moods affect policy, with these moods sometimes owing much to events, such as the attacks on the USA in 2001.67 The long-term consequence of such moods is a matter of debate, but, aside from their contribution to the assumptions formalized as strategic cultures, political history is formulated and acted out in the short term. In contrast to this emphasis on cultural elements, materialist interpretations, not least structuralist accounts of the operation of a world system with rising and falling hegemons, tend to emerge from those who do not use archival sources and particularly those of the political actors involved. This issue is linked to Kennedy’s failure to understand the relative standings of nations in terms of their perception of power. It is as if he expected all historical actors to employ his own determinants of what makes power and, moreover, that these should be the determinants of decision-making. This underplays shifting definitions of power, such as prestige, past performance and admiration, some of which are subsumed in the idea of soft power. In his detailed scholarship, for example The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (1980) and The Realities behind Diplomacy (1983), Kennedy showed a brilliant capacity to appreciate and present the ideas of policy-makers. However, in the Rise and Fall, he did not really seek to reconstruct the world-views of the decision-makers, possibly because this would necessitate a splitters’ rather than a lumpers’ view of things. This reluctance to address the views of foreign policy-making elites can be linked to a disinclination to address incidents or contingent events as they affected perceptions and, thus, later decision-making. They, unfortunately, do not fit into the broad-brush approach, and Kennedy devoted little attention to considering how to reconcile this problem. His explanations, therefore, could favour larger, mostly economic, causes and underplay or ignore the particular, an approach that makes the method of discussing causes in the book suspect. A focus on the policy-makers can also suggest that their capacity to respond in a coherent fashion to developments and, still more, to shape events was generally limited. These limits were those of political circumstance,68 as much as any structural considerations, but these circumstances demonstrate the extent to which great, as much as lesser, powers reacted in a context in which constraints need to be emphasized. This underlines the value of a conceptualization of international relations that appreciates that both realist pressures and cultural responses are as much to do with domestic politics as with intra-state relations.

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To conclude, the linkage between great-power status and economic and technological power needs to be handled with care. Material characteristics do not define power itself, nor do they determine its use, nor the effectiveness of this use. Organization of resources clearly matters, but this is an economic, not materialistic, approach to the subject. Similarly, technology has a cultural dimension: the same piece of hardware can be extremely useful in one society and of little use in another where there is no tradition of using and developing it. Consent and cooperation are important. A lack of visceral opposition might sometimes be confused with consent, but the extent to which imperial expansion drew on the military support of conquered peoples is notable. The role of consent and cooperation was demonstrated by the case of France, which was Christian Europe’s most populous state in 1650–1790, but which periodically was powerless and periodically had a considerable power. Moreover, political events in France in 1789 set in train fundamental changes in international relations. The role of consent and cooperation was linked to that of coalitions of interest, both internal and external, and to the importance of ‘soft power’,69 as, for example, Britain showed in the nineteenth century. Economic factors cannot be divorced from military power, especially the ability to project power, but it is mistaken to establish a deterministic linkage, although the fact that no simple correlation exists does not mean that there is no correlation, nor that more subtle patterns cannot be advanced. Other factors, including the role of circumstances, perception and cultural influences, need to be emphasized, and, collectively, they diminish the appropriateness of materialist interpretations. The latter, moreover, can impose an interpretative straitjacket and can cause certain information to be omitted. Indeed, there is a common theme in the varied criticisms of Kennedy’s book offered in this chapter, namely, that they all reflect problems with his tendency to adopt one approach, one view, one set of parameters over another, asserting that this approach is the only one that can, and should, be considered. This is unsatisfactory, both conceptually and empirically, while the historical context also underlines the conditional and limited nature of what otherwise appears to be the timeless answer.70 When advancing any complexity thesis, however, there is always some danger that the false clarity of the more simplistic stance is replaced by an omnium gatherum of factors. That, nevertheless, is a response to the variety of contexts within which great powers operated and the extent to which their power rested on alliances and perception. These themes will be taken forward in the following chapter.

2 Bids for mastery, 1500–90 Much work on international relations begins at the close of the fifteenth century. This reflects the classic division between medieval and modern history in Western historiography and its attribution to this period. In part, this was a consequence of the attitudes and ideas associated with the Renaissance, but more specifically the attribution is a result of the outbreak of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) with Charles VIII of France’s initially successful invasion of Italy.1 This is a long-standing argument. Writing in 1769, the influential historian William Robertson linked the changing state system he discerned in this period to internal development in the European states, and, crucially, saw the first in terms of new ideas: during the course of the fifteenth century, various events happened, which, by giving Princes more entire command of the force in their respective dominions, rendered their operations more vigorous and extensive. In consequence of this, the affairs of different kingdoms becoming more frequently as well as more intimately connected, they were gradually accustomed to act in concert and confederacy, and were insensibly prepared for forming a system of policy, in order to establish or to preserve such a balance of power as was most consistent with the general security. It was during the reign of Charles the fifth [Holy Roman Emperor, 1519–56], that the ideas, on which this system is founded, first came to be fully understood. It was then, that the maxims by which it has been uniformly maintained since that aera were universally adopted.2 Starting with 1500 in the case of this chapter, however, is an acknowledgement not of the place of the Italian Wars in European history, but, instead, of the importance of longdistance maritime links, and of the transformation that was brought to them when the Europeans began to trade with the Americas and also opened up a direct trade with South and East Asia. From this start flows attention to how best European powers sought to dominate these and related trades, and to conquer territory, and thus to a narrative of greatness; and the usual list of suspects comes into sight. Portugal and Spain come first, with the Dutch, France and Britain following. Moreover, the dramatic range of the power of the Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain), both within Europe and, even more clearly, further afield, underlines the strong sense of difference to what had come earlier in Western history. Under Charles, who linked the Aragonese, Burgundian, Castilian and Habsburg inheritances, Spanish power was established in the New World, and the most powerful American empires were overthrown: those of the Aztecs in Central America and of the Incas in the Andes, in 1519–21 and 1531–3 respectively.

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In terms of scale, the expansion was unprecedented in European history. The Viking episode was the sole previous transoceanic one: Iceland was reached in about 860, Greenland was settled from 986, and, in about 1000, a small settlement was established in Newfoundland. Beyond Iceland, this expansion, however, had been very small-scale, and the failure to seek co-operation with the Inuit of Greenland was a major flaw. This can in part be attributed to the problems of sharing limited resources, but Viking disdain for the Inuit was a serious cultural element. In the end, Inuit opposition, disease, remoteness and the problems of global cooling affecting an already harsh environment, brought the Greenland settlements to a close. In contrast, other periods of European expansion had been more short-distance, although the effort involved had been considerable. This was particularly so of the range of activities summarized as the Crusades, through which Catholic Europe had expanded not only at the expense of the Muslim Middle East and Iberia but also against Byzantium and pagans in Eastern Europe, while political and religious opponents of the Papacy within Catholic Europe were also targeted.3 The contrasts between the two bursts of expansion—the Crusades and transoceanic from the late fifteenth century—suggests that far more than will and/or the European economy was involved in the greater success of the latter. This economy grew in the sixteenth century, and the European population, possibly more significantly, increased, although it was no higher than it had been before c. 1300, but there was no single cause for greater success in the later than in the earlier period. Instead, it is necessary to note the relative weakness of opponents. This was of great relevance for the Crusades, as it helps to explain the difference between expansion in particular spheres in specific periods. Thus, with the Seljuks and Fatimids competing, the Muslims in the late eleventh century lacked the regional unity they displayed two centuries later when the Crusaders were driven from Palestine. In contrast, there was to be no native riposte after Spain had overcome the Aztecs and the Incas, and the European impact, one in which disease played a major role, in the Americas was lasting as well as overwhelming. For the Crusaders, the role of naval capability, while significant, was less important than it was to be for the Spanish conquistadors of the sixteenth century, let alone the contemporary Portuguese expansion around the Indian Ocean. This capability focused attention on the role of state provision of armed strength and thus made states central to the process of European expansion. Furthermore, Habsburg strength provides a potent theme of modernity. The range of this power, especially after Charles’s son, Philip II of Spain, also became Philip I of Portugal in 1580 (following a rapid conquest that gave force to his claim on the succession), suggested modernity in the shape of the first of the great European maritime empires. In this trajectory, Spain, whose kings also ruled Portugal until 1640, was eventually to be succeeded, as a great territorial empire with a maritime core, by Britain; or a series of maritime great powers can be seen, with the Dutch and the USA added to the list. France is included as a would-be leading territorial power with a maritime component, at least insofar as French extra-European power from the seventeenth century depended on maritime support. However, the opposition to the Habsburgs could also be interpreted as another form of modernity, a theme that can be taken forward by seeing nationalist opposition to empires (including that of the Austrian Habsburgs) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an expression of progressive forces. This interpretation of opposition to the Habsburgs in the

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early modern period as modernizing was the case, whether the last was seen in the bourgeois individualism, commercial zeal and Galvinism of the Dutch Revolt that began in the 1560s and that ultimately led to Dutch independence, finally acknowledged by Spain by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; or in the national policies of England under Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) and France under Henry IV (r. 1589–1610); or in the pluralist international system forced on the Habsburgs in the Peace of Westphalia at the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1648). Each of these was an aspect of what can be presented as an anti-imperial and anti-hegemonic ideology and practice; and modernity within the Western world can be located in terms of such an opposition. This is an argument, however, that is open to qualification, not least because the authority claimed by the states of the period was itself imperial. They sought to be great powers even if the circuit of this power was restricted. The clearest example was the preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals (to Rome) passed by the English Parliament in 1533, a major legislative step in the Henrician Reformation, that took place under Henry VIII. This expression of national sovereignty claimed that: by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same. Such claims, however, would not have been out of place for monarchs elsewhere in the world. It is also difficult to see the opposition to the Habsburgs by France or the North German Protestant princes as modern. Moreover, the willingness of some rulers, whether the Habsburg Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I (r. 1558–64), or Landgrave Philip of Hesse in 1567, and Elector John George I of Saxony in 1652, to divide their territories among relatives revealed the ambiguous relationship between dynasticism and statebuilding.

The Eurasian interior More seriously, it is unclear why, even if the focus on modernity is to be around 1500, the emphasis should therefore be on the Western powers. In part, there is a preference here in Western thought for maritime over land powers and routes. This preference is teleological and cultural. It is teleological in that the role of maritime routes was clearly to be fundamental to world economic links and the global economy by 1800 but was not necessarily so in the sixteenth century. The preference is also cultural, in that there is a marked Western European preference for the sea as a cause and course of progress, not least with a tendency to associate navies with liberal values, as opposed to armies. Nevertheless, a different narrative for modern history can be offered and one with other starting points. There were false starts in that the wide-ranging links that were created were not sustained, but the Chinggisid (descendants of Chinggis Khan) Mongol Empire of the thirteenth century has been claimed as the starting point for continuous global history, since it led to the beginning of interlinking exchange-circuits of technologies, ideas and even diseases. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Mongol

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rulers deliberately helped such circuits in order to strengthen their system. This took further already-existing links along the silk roads and was particularly important to relations between China and Persia (Iran).4 The West benefited from the religious pluralism of the Mongols in order to understand more of the world to the East, which proved a major encouragement to Western exploration. There was also a key power-political point in that the Mongols, in their quest for world conquest, were not only able to conquer China (both the Jurchin Jin Empire in the north and the Song Empire in the south), Persia, Turkestan, Iraq and Syria, but also to put considerable pressure on eastern Europe, defeating opposing forces in both Poland and Hungary in 1241, at Liegnitz and Mohi respectively. Their capacity to advance further in Europe was lessened by the need to capture numerous fortified positions but, as the conquest of China from 1211 to the 1270s demonstrated, this was not an insuperable problem. Instead, a decision not to persist in Europe was crucial, not least because it removed the option of competing local interests seeking Mongol support. The situation in the Latin East (the Crusading states) indicated that it was possible, despite serious Crusader mistrust, to extend the Mongol alliance system to include Christian states otherwise concerned about the threat posed by the Egyptian-based Mameluks.5 Consideration of the Mongols provides a resonance for the discussion in this book about the problems of underplaying China and the Ottoman Empire (see pp. 1–2). Without doubt, each were most certainly a great power. Besides creating the largest contiguous empire of their period, the Mongol military simply dominated virtually all of their opponents, although, as with all militaries, they did encounter delays and defeats. They also avoided many of the problems that Kennedy discusses, particularly overextending their resources. Aside from appointing commanders on talent not blood-right and uniting the nomadic tribes into a single force, the Mongol tidal-wave method of conquest was especially effective: they invaded and devastated a large region but then withdrew and held only a small section of territory. The Mongols thus created a buffer zone that made it impossible to attack them and also weakened the enemy’s resources. Also, by only occupying small chunks of territory, they did not tie down troops in garrison duty. Instead, a relatively small force could control the region. Meanwhile, behind the new territory, the civil administration moved in and integrated territories into the empire. Then, the border troops (tammacin) moved forward and added new territory. This tidal-wave process—the large invasions, then pulling troops back, then surging forward again like a wave—allowed the Mongols to fight on multiple fronts without overextending themselves.6 This process lasted until the reign of Möngke Khan (1250–9), a grandson of Chinggis Khan, under whom administrative reforms permitted a maximizing of their resources, so that the Mongols may have had over 1 million troops. This enabled the Mongols to eliminate one opponent at a time and to send huge armies, such as that which captured Baghdad in 1258, a murderous fate held out in 2003 by Saddam Hussiein when he sought to rally Iraqi nationalism. Consideration of the Mongols also serves as a reminder about the extent to which developments in one sphere may result from, or at least be affected by, those at a considerable distance. Mongol capability to the west in part resulted from their success against the Jurchin Jin of north China. The length of time taken to conquer southern China, which proved a more formidable problem than Persia or Central Asia, was in part also due to the effort devoted elsewhere. Links, however, were not simply about

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conquest. Although the Mongols brought much destructiveness, their capacity for developing links between China, Persia, India and Europe was also important. In counterfactual (what if) terms, this can be seen as thwarting a Chinese ability under nonMongol rule to supplement the maritime links under the Song dynasty with South-East Asia and India by developing overland links with (a poorer) Europe, but the Chinese drive to do the latter under the Song did not match what was to be shown by the Mongols. The Mongol Empire did not fall because of economic problems. Indeed, the tax system and administration were reasonably effective and the treasury was doing quite well. After the death of Möngke in 1259, however, a civil war over the throne ensued and then rivalry between other Chinggisid princes tore the inheritance into four empires, a fate similar to that of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great after his death in 323 BC, and one that the more compact Mughal Empire managed to avoid in the midseventeenth century. The princes continued to fight, Khubilai, the Great Khan, another grandson of Chinggis, who moved the capital to Beijing in 1264, for instance fighting Qaidu, a grandson of Ogodei (the second ruler of the Empire), who placed puppets in charge of the Chagatai Khanate; and eventually the empires splintered further. This does not adequately explain the final disappearance of the Mongol Empire. The Il-Khanid Empire in the Middle East, one of the successor states, actually fell, after it had finally achieved stability, because of lack of heirs to the throne. The Golden Horde, another successor state, suffered from economic decline, but ultimately it was because Timur (1336–1405) and the Golden Horde Khan, Toqtamish (a former protégé of Timur), fought. Prestige and legitimacy were important to this. Timur was not a Chinggisid, and, to be a legitimate ruler in Inner Asia, it was necessary to be descended from Chinggis Khan. In the end, Toqtamish lost, and Timur destroyed the cities (and commerce centres) of the Golden Horde, sacking their capital, New Sarai on the Volga in 1395 and rerouted the trade routes to converge on his capital of Samarqand. Economic reasons played a role in the decline in all of the Mongol states, but only as an ancillary factor. The Mongols were not accumulating huge debts from military expenditures. There is only one part of the empire where this really played a part, and that was the Empire of the Great Khan or East Asia, including China: as it had become more and more of a sedentary state, payment of troops and so forth did play a larger role. In China, corruption in the bureaucracy also angered many, as did animosity between the rulers and ruled, natural disasters and less competent rulers. The Mongols were driven from China by rebellions in 1356–68, leading to the establishment of the Ming dynasty by Zhu Yuanzhang. More generally, Eurasian nomads and overland merchants played a continuing and vital role in East Asian, Middle Eastern and European history, either directly or as catalysts for developments in these regions. Land links could not provide the worldranging interaction that European ocean-going ships could offer, and the latter became particularly important due to the boost provided to Eurasian commercial networks by New World bullion, with European merchants able to finance negative trade-balances as a result.7 Nevertheless, land links were of great significance, not least given the concentration of the world’s population in East and South Asia and the availability of routes from there to the Middle East and the Black Sea region, most famously the silk roads. These routes remained important well into the eighteenth century.8 Reliable

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population figures do not exist, but a reconceptualization and presentation of space to give due weight to population would indicate that Western maritime routes were less central than the standard Mercator map projection developed in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century might suggest, because the resulting map would be dominated by East and South Asia. This can be taken even further if the limitations of transoceanic shipping and trade are considered, not least reliance on winds, vulnerability to weather, supply issues of food and water for the crew and the relative infrequency of such voyages. The relevance of Asian developments and of Asian-European routes can be underlined by noting the significance of technological advances such as gunpowder. This was a matter not simply of weaponry, but also of the military and state forms that made the most effective use of it. The weaponry, not the forms, spread to Christian Europe, but the situation in China has led Peter Lorge to suggest that ‘early modern warfare was invented in China during the 12th and 13th centuries’, as part of an argument that rejects what he presents as a misleading attempt by Western scholars to downplay the success and effectiveness of Asian cultures and polities.9

Assessing progress The standard view, Europe equals maritime trade and progress, whereas the rest do not, is generally amplified, as by Kennedy, with reference to the Chinese abandonment in the 1430s of expeditions to the Indian Ocean. These expeditions were probably intended to extend the range of the tributary system that was important to China’s view of its global position.10 An element of subjectivity, however, can be seen in the criticism of the Chinese for turning against the Mongols rather than sustaining their interest in the Indian Ocean, but, on the other hand, with the lack of a similar disapprobation of Christendom for devoting considerable efforts to conflict with Islam, not only defensive, in the Balkans, but also offensive, most obviously with Portuguese and Spanish expansionism in North Africa. Conflict with Islam was scarcely secondary to transoceanic expansion. Indeed, defensive and offensive can be seen as a false dichotomy, as, aside from the fact that they could be operationally linked, these were each strategies in what was seen as an existentialist struggle.11 The Emperor Charles V was to take up this theme and, even more, to be used to propagate it, not least by his Grand Chancellor, Gattinara. Indeed, Charles was depicted and proclaimed as the last world emperor, whose reign would witness the reconquest of the Holy Land and be the prelude of the millennium.12 This was not a limitation of great power to the mundane details of policy on Earth, or, looked at differently, the latter were only given meaning and purpose by this greater mission. This was an approach to great-power status that encompassed such states as the Ottoman Empire, Imperial and Communist China or the Soviet Union, as well as liberal states such as Britain and the USA that saw themselves as having a world civilizing mission or, at least, as trying to transform politics as an element of grand strategy.13 In practice, Charles, in person, captured Tunis in 1535 and failed against Algiers in 1541. In the standard view, the Western Europeans are seen as the key international traders from the mid-fifteenth century. However, aside from the extent to which the European impact in the Americas owed much to conquest and disease, particularly smallpox,14

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rather than commerce, a wider consideration at the global level of trade makes it unclear how far a theme of Western advantage can be pushed for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15 This is not only a case of the situation around the Indian Ocean where Asian merchants continued to play key roles. There has also been a questioning of the tendency to stress differences between the organization and functioning of the Chinese and Atlantic European economies.16 In addition, it has been argued that the Ottoman Empire was more open to commercial interests and readier to develop maritime power and concerns than has been generally appreciated.17 The questioning of the established view of the Ottoman Empire as fundamentally territorial, military and agrarian is certainly one that requires fleshing out, and many specialists continue to emphasize the established view. Nevertheless, even in this respect, there appears to be scant contrast between the Ottoman Empire and the majority of European states in the sixteenth century, as most of the latter were not oceanic powers. This majority included states with a coastline, such as Poland and Sweden, as the Atlantic Ocean was only readily accessible to states with Atlantic coastlines. The states with such coastlines include some of the more prominent European states, states whose resources and power were enhanced, and identities changed by transoceanic expansion: Portugal, Spain, France and Britain; the Dutch are on the North Sea which is linked to the Atlantic. However, other states were not included in this list and some became major European powers, particularly Austria, and, later, Russia and, finally, Prussia, the basis of German unification in the late nineteenth century. The causes and measures of economic progress, at the very least, can be seen as indistinct, not least insofar as they were dependent on transoceanic trade. As a result, economic progress cannot be readily discussed for these years in terms of a comparison of particular societies and cultures at the global scale. This challenges the placing of the power—economy equation advanced by Kennedy. The focus on the West can also be queried by drawing attention to the number of states that launched ambitious bids for power in this period, ranging from the Safavids under Isma’il, who conquered Persia (Iran) and Iraq in 1501–10, to Adal in the Horn of Africa under Iman Ahmad Gragn, who launched a holy war against Christian Ethiopia in the 1520s. At the very least, this number should lessen the customary focus on the Habsburgs and their European opponents. This focus, indeed, owes less to the inherent relative importance of this struggle for the sixteenth-century world than to the extent to which this struggle is seen as crucial to the subsequent multipolar nature of power in a West that already dominated the Atlantic world, and, by 1880, was to have a global hegemony.

The Turkish Empire For much of the sixteenth century, the focus can, at least in part, however, be displaced from the West, not, it is true, to China, whose power did not expand in these years, but rather to the Ottoman Empire. Here, the key date close to 1500 was 1517 when the Ottomans, after a rapid victory at Raydaniyya, conquered Egypt, destroying the Mameluke Empire; Syria had already been overrun the previous year after victory at Marj Dabiq, a victory that was due to a variety of factors: the use of firepower, the fact that the Ottoman army was far larger and treason by a key Mameluke commander. From Egypt, the Ottomans extended their power along the coast of North Africa and down the Red

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Sea. The conquests brought together a congeries of territory that closely resembled that which the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire had lost in the seventh century and never subsequently regained. Economically, the Ottoman Empire, which, like Byzantium, had its capital at Constantinople, was the inheritor of important Euro-Asian and, to a lesser extent, trans-Saharan trading networks. The wealth of the Empire sustained an important territorial expansionism that also reflected the cultural ethos of Turkish society and the particular ambitions of its rulers, especially Mehmed II (r. 1444–6, 1451–81), Selim I, the Grim (r. 1512–20), and Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66). Their successes were won with far more troops than those of Spain in the New World, but were in many respects as impressive as the Spanish overthrow of the Aztec and Inca Empires. Ottoman control of Egypt and Serbia was to last nearly as long as Spanish dominance over the American mainland, while their rule of Bulgaria, Iraq and Syria was to last longer. Aside from the conquest of the Mameluke empire, Ottoman forces exerted significant pressure on the Safavids to the east, defeating the outnumbered Isma’il at Chaldiran in 1514 and conquering Iraq in 1534, although it would be inaccurate to see the conflict simply in terms of warfare. There was also a major propaganda attempt that involved presenting the Ottomans as the key Islamic empire, indeed the universal empire, and one opposed by heretics (Safavids) and their allies (Mamelukes), whose attempts made it more difficult to take part in the existential struggle with Christian infidels. Moreover, the conflict with the Mamelukes left the Ottoman sultans in control of the holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the last from where Muhammad ascended to Heaven. This control was a powerful source of legitimacy, and thus of power status, that lasted until these were lost in the First World War.18 The Sultan termed himself ‘Servant of the Two Sanctuaries’, and, from the 1540s, Caliph. Furthermore, in part in reaction to Charles V’s assertiveness,19 the Ottomans continued their long-standing advance into the Balkans, pushing far further in doing so than Byzantium had done. Weakly garrisoned Belgrade, which had defied Ottoman sieges in 1440 and 1456, fell in 1521; Louis II of Hungary was defeated and killed at Mohacs in 1526, a major success for firearms over heavy cavalry; and, in 1529, the Ottomans advanced as far as Vienna. They did not capture it, but there was no doubt of the direction of pressure.20 This was accentuated in the Mediterranean where the Ottomans deployed a large fleet,21 captured Rhodes in 1522 as well as Venetian territories, such as Cyprus (1570–1), and extended their range into the western basin of the sea. There they established a presence in Algiers where, in 1519, the privateer Hayreddin Barbarossa offered his loyalty to Selim I and was appointed governor. This was an instance of the expansion of empire as a result of far more than conquest. So also was the move of Ottoman power into Hungary, as Mohacs had been followed not by Ottoman conquest but by a struggle for the kingdom between Charles V’s brother Ferdinand and the anti-Habsburg János Szapolyai. The latter turned to the Ottomans for support, a classic instance of the way in which local protégés sought to manipulate the situation. Suleiman preferred to influence the situation through him until Szapolyai died in 1540. Ferdinand then contested control anew and Suleiman, in response, conquered central Hungary, capturing Buda in 1541, Esztergom in 1543 and Temesvār in 1552.22 Nevertheless, unlike Persia, Egypt, northern India and, in the seventeenth century, China, in each of which invaders overthrew dynasties, Christian-ruled Europe in the sixteenth

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century essentially contained external attack, albeit with the loss of much territory, which was added to the important losses already made since 1356 when the Ottomans had first advanced into Europe. It is difficult to see on what basis the Ottoman Empire can be excluded from the list of great powers and, therefore, from the analysis of how such powers developed. Indeed, such an exclusion would suggest the bias towards Orientalism so often seen in the Western analysis of Islamic and Oriental societies.23 If only a European context of greatpower status is advanced, it is instructive that the Ottoman Empire indeed dominated so much of Europe in the sixteenth century. In this context, the ‘European’ alliance system saw France, surrounded by Habsburg possessions, periodically seek cooperation with the Ottomans. In turn, Christian powers, including the Austrians and Venetians, wishing to draw off Ottoman attention, sought to negotiate with the Safavids. This provided an indication that great powers can be defined as those that were seen as great powers, that is, worth negotiating with and entering into the calculations of power dynamics. In comparison, the Ottoman presence in the Indian Ocean was more modest. Inheriting the Mameluke naval role in the Red Sea, the Ottomans, from the base at Suez, pushed it further, establishing their power down the sea, most critically at Aden in 1538 (although Yemen was only brought under real suzerainty from 1567–71). In doing so, they thwarted Portuguese attempts to make themselves a Red Sea power. From the Red Sea and, subsequently, from their conquest of Iraq, the Ottomans projected their power into the Indian Ocean. Success, however, was limited. The Ottomans were unable to sustain a presence in Indian waters, although they were more successful in the Horn of Africa (until defeat by the Ethiopians in 1578) and further down the coast of East Africa. In the long term, Ottoman limitations in the region helped ensure that the Indian Ocean became a zone of European naval and imperial activity. Indeed, the leading Islamic naval power in the region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to be Oman, which operated as a vigorous regional power in the Arabian Sea and along the coast of East Africa, capturing the Portuguese bases of Muscat in 1650 and Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1698 and retaining a presence based at Zanzibar until the late nineteenth century. The success of Oman indicated that naval and amphibious capability was not restricted to Western powers, and this makes the Ottoman failure to develop their presence in the Indian Ocean more striking. However, rather than concluding from this that the Ottomans had some serious flaws and should be excluded from the list of great powers, it is more pertinent to note that all the major imperial states of the period only devoted a portion of their strength to longrange activity. In discussing the Spaniards in the New World, let alone the Far East, it is important not to overlook the extent to which Spain focused its resources on European commitments. Within these, there was a number of challenges, including the Mediterranean struggle with the Ottomans, which was particularly intensive in the early 1570s, the Morisco rebellion in Spain in 1568–70, the Dutch Revolt and war with France and England. The interrelationships between these challenges put pressure on Philip II as he had to choose priorities, and there are questions as to whether he had a coordinated strategy linking his commitments, but his was the choice.24 Furthermore, the Portuguese devoted more effort to their ultimately unsuccessful attempt to develop their position in

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nearby Morocco, an attempt that went down to crushing defeat at Alcazarquivir in 1578, than they did to the distant Indian Ocean.25 Thus, the limited Ottoman role in the Indian Ocean should not be seen as an aspect of failure, not least because the Ottomans were also heavily committed in other spheres. Indeed, their ability to focus on key fronts indicated that the Ottomans generally avoided overstretch.26 The Ottomans also chose not to commit heavily to the Indian Ocean. In part, the influential sipahis and janissaries of the army pushed for land campaigns.

Strategic overreach Kennedy deployed his concept of strategic overreach as a key feature of great-power status, at once a product of expansion and a cause of decline. The concept is indeed an apparently plausible one but faces the serious conceptual difficulty of assuming a clearcut measure of strategic reach. The extent to which overreach is, in fact, a matter of perception, both for contemporaries and subsequently, needs underlining and leads to a questioning of any ready application of the concept, not least by returning it to the sphere of contention in which policy was formulated and discussed. In the case of the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean, there is the apparent contradiction in scholarly assumptions that had they projected power further and/ or more consistently—for example, to make a sustained effort to challenge Portuguese interests in East African and Indian waters—there would have been a charge of strategic overreach; but, because they did not do so, this is taken to indicate limited goals and, in particular, a failure to appreciate the oceanic destiny of empires. This problem, with contradictory assumptions underlaying analysis, is more generally true, and, indeed, induces a degree of scepticism about many scholarly judgements, whether qualitative or quantitative. Linked to this is a tendency to argue policies from choices and actions, without due care in assessing the relationship and the problems of ascribing cause from effect. In practice, such an oceanic destiny was distinctly marginal to the Asian empires of the period. The Ottoman Empire, with its major naval presence in the Mediterranean, made no efforts to project its power into the Atlantic. This was not necessarily some proof of defective strategic judgement and culture, anachronistic elite values and redundancy, but a response to the marginal nature of such concerns for the Ottoman Empire in this conflict. Yet again, fitness for purpose is the key theme. The charge of unsuccessful strategic overreach is sometimes applied to the Ottomans, whether in the Indian Ocean, or striving for Vienna in 1529 or Astrakhan in 1569,27 but, more usually, to Spain, particularly under Philip II (r. 1556–98) and his Habsburg successors, especially his grandson Philip IV (r. 1621–65).28 As such, Spain apparently takes on significance as the first major modern exemplar of such overreach, prefiguring Britain’s position in the early twentieth century and that of the USA at present. The concept also appears to provide an analytical approach to the trajectory of Spain’s early modern history. Geoffrey Parker indeed suggested that ‘the monarchy inherited by Philip II was never viable: that he could only defend it with great difficulty and at prohibitive cost’.29 Overreach can be seen as characteristic of the empire as a whole, but it can also be presented as the explanation of particular failures. These include the attempts to contest control of Tunis with the Ottomans, to suppress the Dutch Revolt, to prevent

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Henry of Navarre from gaining the French throne or to overthrow or coerce Elizabeth I of England, all in the late sixteenth century, or with reference to failures against the Dutch, French and English in the seventeenth century. The problem with overreach is that it sounds obvious but lacks ready measurement. Financial problems, or a lack of adequate military resources, are not helpful as measures of overreach, as both are true of most combatants in history. Moreover, it is unclear that restraint, the presumed opposite of overreach, means much, either in prudential terms or with reference to the dominant strand of the political culture of the age. With its stress on honour and dynastic responsibility and its concern with gloire and the normative values of combat,30 the dominant political culture was scarcely cautious or pacific. In prudential terms, war and expansion appeared possible, successful and necessary. Within Europe, rulers sought simultaneously to consolidate authority and to gain territory; and to opt out would not have seemed sensible. If, for example, Philip II’s grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, had not pursued the interests of his forebears in southern Italy, then it would possibly have come into the French orbit. This remained a prospect, not least in the 1520s and the 1640s, and helped explain Spanish naval strategy in the Mediterranean: a prudent defence of interest was at issue and not overreach.31 On a wider scale, Spain faced consolidation in the Islamic world, as the Ottomans conquered the Mameluke Empire and established their influence in North Africa.32 To respond to this by trying to avoid conflict and, instead, defining mutually acceptable spheres of influence was impracticable. Such a policy would also have been politically and culturally unacceptable as far as Spain was concerned and would furthermore have compromised the Spanish position in Italy, particularly with the Papacy. Such a policy would also have been a serious signalling of weakness. Furthermore, there was no reason to believe that such a compromise with the Ottomans could have been reached short of large-scale conflict, and the same was true of Spain’s policies north of the Pyrenees and Alps. In short, strategic reach could only be defined as part of, and yet also in response to, what others might see as overreach. Far from being alternatives, reach and overreach were part of the same process. Spain’s very success, moreover, seemed to suggest that overreach was not a helpful concept. The conquest, by relatively small forces, of much of what had been—to Europeans—an unknown world in the Americas,33 a process repeated on a smaller scale in the Philippines, did not demonstrate the value of limits. A desire to avoid risk would have kept the Spaniards in the Caribbean offshore the American mainland or would have left Malta unrelieved in 1565; in fact, the arrival of a Spanish relief force from Sicily, 11,000 strong, was crucial in the ending of the siege.34 The same could be argued of Gustavus Adolf of Sweden’s intervention in Germany in the early 1630s during the Thirty Years’ War.35 Although the risk environment there was sufficiently serious to lead to the charge of overreach, not least in light of Danish, Polish and Russian animosity and concern about Habsburg predominance, Swedish intervention was an opportunity cost in thwarting possible acquisitions by opponents and also led to significant gains in territory and status. This was a formidable effort. Gustavus Adolf brought in more than 50,000 soldiers (effective strength, not nominal) from outside Germany before he could begin to raise any important number of new German regiments. The creation of a Baltic empire by seventeenth-century Sweden is an example of a state exceeding the likely bounds of its material resources.36

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The element of perception central to the apparently objective notion of strategic overreach also reflects the ideological and cultural assumptions of the perceiver, assumptions that are frequently subliminal but nonetheless very significant. In the case of Spain, there is a long-standing perception which can be described as Whiggish or liberal. It reflects critical views on Catholicism and, correspondingly, the customary association of progress with Protestantism. Aside from being anachronistic, the Spanish Empire emerges in this account as something that had to be defeated in order to usher in the future. Given this perception, it is not surprising that the idea of overreach is applied to Spain. This may, in part, also stem from the navalist perspective of the historiography (see p. 4). In contrast, the Ottomans are not generally criticized for strategic overreach, possibly because all their major conquests were contiguous in land-based terms and, therefore, to a navalist, ‘natural’ and not overreaching. Perhaps the paradigmatic case of strategic overreach in Western historiography involves Athens, a naval power, and its unsuccessful expedition to Syracuse during the Peleponnesian War (431–404 BC). Aside from the Turks, it is instructive to consider comparisons with the major Oriental states. The English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 occurred shortly before the Korean defeat of the Japanese fleet at the battle of the Yellow Sea in 1592. Far from being an isolated instance of East Asian naval activity, the Japanese rapidly deployed cannon on their warships and used them with effect in 1593 and 1597, but, in 1598, the Koreans were supported by a Chinese fleet under an artillery expert and, that year, the Japanese fleet was defeated at the battle of the Noryang Straits: the Koreans appear to have had a lead in cannon. This battle helped bring the Japanese invasions of Korea to an end. They had already been checked on land in Korea, in campaigns that were a testament ‘to the military rejuvenation’ of the reign of the Wanli emperor of China (r. 1573–1620) and that indicated Ming success in maintaining the status quo in East Asia. In contrast, European expansion there was irrelevant.37 Gunned warships were crucial to naval conflict off Asia as well as off Europe, but there was a major difference in consequence. England sought to exploit its naval strength by attacking the Spanish overseas empire and developing trade to the Indian Ocean,38 while there was no similar thrust to power on the part of China, Japan or Korea. Instead, naval capability and effectiveness in East Asia remained localized. Moreover, it was not sustained. As in Western Europe, the choice between land or sea power had political and governmental consequences that influenced socio-economic changes, but in East Asia the choice was far more for land power; although it is important to note the extent to which the Western European states also maintained large armies and generally, even in the Dutch case, gave their preference to them.39 Chinese naval forces were usually not organizationally differentiated from the ground forces; thus, the term ‘navy’ is misleading, and ‘water forces’ may be a more appropriate designation. There was no imperial naval staff and no Admiral of China. This issue, however, can be approached from another direction than that of geopolitics by asking whether the true weakness of non-Western powers was that they were overly dependent on state direction and initiatives. The Western states can then be favourably contrasted by arguing that they contained more ‘space’ for semi-independent initiatives by autonomous groups. These are generally seen in terms of mercantile interests, although there is also room for considering the pro-consular power of governmental agents in frontier provinces in this light. The role of mercantile interests can be linked to

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structural and cultural interpretations of the nature of Western and non-Western states. The Western states can be presented as coalitions of interests in which mercantile groups and concerns played a prominent role, a process eased by the extent to which, in these states, such groups were not members of religious minorities. As a result, a commonality of interest can be detected, and this can be seen as important to the rise of the West. An emphasis on trade does not, however, have to mean that trade is necessarily understood in modern terms, nor that trade should be automatically seen in terms of a preference for liberal values. Instead, trade can be seen as centrally linked to violence, as in privateering.40 From that perspective, the ideological factors that helped legitimate violence, such as religious animosity, were important.41 This helped lead to a marked deterioration in Anglo-Spanish relations in the 1580s, culminating in a war that began in 1585.42 This lasted until 1604 and was the longest international struggle waged by England for over a century. In contrast, non-Western states can be seen as lacking such a commonality of interest between government and trade. In part, this lack is presented in terms of cultural divisions between ruling elites, which were primarily land-based and with a collective identity looking back to martial and nomadic values, and mercantile groups, which were urban and largely from religious minorities, such as Armenians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Functional factors can also be related to this, not least the gap between capitals and port cities, for example, in the Safavid, Mughal and Chinese (although not the Ottoman) Empires and the extent to which the Safavids, Mughals and Chinese devoted relatively little effort to conflict at sea, naval capability, commerce raiding or commerce protection. In contrast, in Europe, there was ample experience43 that served as a skillbasis for the expansion of these activities outside Europe. This contrast offers a convenient background for studying the rise of the West, but it threatens to simplify and reify the West and the non-West. The first is presented in terms of a cooperation with commerce that would, for example, have surprised commentators on the Austrian Habsburgs.44 This situation underlines the heterogeneity of ‘the West’. Indeed, the characteristics frequently ascribed to it, including an enlarged role for mercantile interests in shaping policy, really only applied to a small part of Europe. Much ‘European’ or ‘Western’ exceptionalism is, on close examination, really ‘British’ or British and Dutch exceptionalism in disguise. Moreover, work on the non-West is insufficient to justify the somewhat bold statements sometimes advanced. It would be more appropriate to argue that the indications are that there is a contrast but that non-Western states were still able to tap mercantile networks, while the naval resilience of the Ottomans was shown by the rapid building of a large new navy after their serious defeat at Lepanto in 1571.45 This helped ensure that the Venetians and Spaniards still thought of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century as a great power. If non-Western mercantile networks had only very limited impact on strategic cultures, it is unclear that the impact was significantly greater in sixteenth-century European states. Indeed, the ‘realist’ goals of these rulers related not so much to materialist concepts—the pursuit of trade or of territory—as to the dynastic and personal prestige that helped elicit support.46 This was an accurate response to the social politics of Europe in which the landed elite enjoyed both power and autonomy. Such a situation led to a practice and culture of power that left scant role for mercantile values. Furthermore,

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as in Asia, there could be an estrangement based on ethnic or religious differences that affected the treatment of merchants. In this respect, the Jews were joined, in Catholic countries, by Protestants. Alongside the contrast between the West and the non-West can come a consideration of important variations among the latter. Conventionally, China was contrasted with such powers as the Ottoman Empire, with an argument that Chinese culture did not put an emphasis on force. However, traditional suppositions about Chinese political culture can be rethought by noting a persistent role of force in Chinese history. It is too easy, therefore, to push a contrast between China and post-Roman Europe, with the former presented as more pacific. China’s geopolitical dominance of its region and its sense that invulnerability was normal related to its ability to dominate regional political and ideological culture, but it was still necessary for China to adjust to other powers. Chinese assumptions about the proper operation of international relations were not always matched by the actions of others. In Christian Europe, there was no such geopolitical dominance. Indeed, the multipolarity of the European states system, the consequent anarchic nature of European power politics with high rates of conflict and the kaleidoscopic character of alliances there all help to account for the development of ‘realist’ paradigms of international behaviour, for Western experiences and conceptions of international relations were to dominate subsequent writing on the subject. However, rather than seeing Chinese practice, in contrast, as pacific, it is important, in addition to European ‘realism’, to give due weight to Chinese expansionist tendencies; although, as also in Europe, there were problems of definition. What to some was expansionism was not seen thus by the Chinese. This was an issue with opponents of China living in modern Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, but the problem was more widespread. For example, the war against Yang Yinlong in south-west China from 1587 until 1600 entailed the ending of the autonomy of a family that had long controlled part of the region. As this control had not been that of a sovereign power, this could be regarded as the suppression of a rebellion, but that does not describe the reality of what was a war of expansion as much as consolidation. Moreover, amplifying the problems of assessing expansion and aggression, Korea could, in Chinese terms, be seen as a sub-kingdom rather than an independent power. For China, as for most other land powers, there was nothing inherent about state limits, and the notion of obvious geographical bounds is dubious. That does not mean that geography did not play a role, but rather that it is necessary to be wary about assuming a deterministic relationship between geography and policy. Stressing the impact of geographical considerations does not imply that it can be assumed that there were necessary consequences in how the Chinese should respond to these considerations. Combined with the role of cultural suppositions and decision-making, in deciding policy and how best to pursue it, this ensured that the Chinese response to neighbours was far from determined by structures. Instead, there was a dynamic character that owed much to domestic politics, particularly the role of individual monarchs, as well as the interplay of the powers involved. The net effect was that, by 1760, other states or proto-states in Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia all succumbed. This had an effect further afield, as such states were not simply part of a Chinese system.47 Consideration of China serves to introduce the complexity of the concept of strategic culture. This concept has been much discussed of late as it apparently offers a way to

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systematize the field of goals and tasks. This approach directs attention to the concepts and moods that help frame the formulation of tasks, as well as the moments when decisions are taken: ideological factors, as well as political and military contingencies; and thus provides a greater depth to geopolitical analyses. Such an interpretation directs attention to the specificity of particular national conditions and, thus, to variety between states and diversity within the international system. This underlines the methodological difficulties of devising a general theory in which all states will be assumed to operate in a similar fashion.48 It is necessary, indeed, to consider strategic cultures in contemporary terms rather than in the light of misplaced modern concepts. The search for prestige, for example, was not as an ‘add-on’ to policies designed in a ‘rational’ light, but, instead, was a crucial component of international and domestic power. Such considerations played a major role both in strategic objectives, such as the acquisition of territory, and also in operational methods, such as military campaigns and dynastic marriages,49 with rulers seeking to secure triumphs that were as much symbolic as real. The strategic cultures within which goals were defined were far from immutable or uncontested. Indeed, the primacy of foreign policy was frequently expressed in the role of disputes over goals in political divisions and polarization; while different traditions and styles in geopolitical behaviour can be traced to past leaders.50 Even in the case of autocracies, foreign policy could be a focus of, and framework for, debate and contention.51 Indeed, history could play a role in this debate, as means, symbol and vocabulary for discussion.52 The political assumptions and discussions that were crucial to strategic cultures could be affected, indeed transformed, by alliance politics, domestic political shifts and military developments, including new weaponry, although the latter played a role within geopolitical constructs and environmental circumstances.53 These constructs and circumstances could, in turn, be influenced by change, not least new communication routes, a point made by Halford Mackinder, the prime mover of modern geopolitics, when, in 1904, he discussed the impact of railways on international competition in Asia.54 Air power provided an even more dramatic instance of the same process. A sense of threat was important. If, for example, the dynamism in Chinese strategic culture owed much to the perception of landward threats from the north, this owed something to the long-standing role in the consciousness of settled societies of fear of the horseman and of raiders from the steppe.55 The sociological basis to this fear was one of a contrast between settled, agrarian societies and their nomadic, pastoral counterparts, and the military one was a concern about the potency of mounted archers. In 1571, the Chinese signed a treaty with the Altan Khan of the Mongols, while Khan Devlet Girei of the Crimean Tatars launched a devastating raid on Muscovy, and Kuchum, the new Khan of Sibir (on the river Irtysh in Siberia), stopped paying tribute to Moscow. Fifty years earlier, the Crimean and Kazan Tatars had advanced on Moscow, and the city was saved only by an attack on the Crimea by the Tatars of Astrakhan. Strategic culture across much of Eurasia can thus be constructed in terms of clashing socio-political systems, although it is also possible to argue that frontiers were generally zones of interaction and that conflict was only one part of an interaction that could also include cooperation.56 A similar re-evaluation is possible in the case of different religions, such as Islam and Hinduism in India. Moreover, the Ottomans ruled large numbers of Christians, especially, but not only, in the Balkans, without embarking on genocidal practices or ‘ethnic

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cleansing’. Indeed, their system of autocratic, but delegated, government could readily adapt to the rule of non-Muslims. Furthermore, despite their ideal of world empire, and the belief that a permanent state of war existed between Islam and the infidel, there was nothing inevitable for the Ottomans about full-scale conflict with Austria or Spain. At the personal level, there was also considerable intermarriage between conquerors and local women. Thus, by 1600, to use terms such as ‘Portuguese’ or ‘Mughal’ is unhelpful if they imply ethnicity, although they may well describe culture. Strategic cultures were not therefore driven by ineluctable tensions, and this helps explain why periods of peace should not simply be seen as preparations for war. This, however, does not mean that ideological factors played no part in policy. The presence and role of confessors and other clerics in Christian courts was a demonstration of the normative role of religion at the highest levels.57 Nor is it a case that more ‘rational’ drives were involved in European, or at least Western European, activity, while other cultures were still trammelled by simpler drives. This interpretation was part of a Whiggish account of the rise of the West, in which progress was associated with commerce and reason, an account that is no longer convincing. Thus, for example, the drive for profit was very important to Western transoceanic expansion in the sixteenth century but so also was the spread of Christianity, including a messianic anti-Muslim component to Portuguese policy.58 Similarly, the policy of Philip II of Spain towards England in the 1590s displayed a lack of consistency, particularly over whether to overthrow the Protestant dynasty or, instead, to pursue the more limited goal of forcing the English out of their support for the Dutch Protestants, and this was linked to a contrast between emphasis on religious crusading and on pragmatic considerations.59 ‘Reputation’, not material considerations, played a major role in Spanish strategic thinking. A perception of menace ensured that strategic culture also encompassed the domestic sphere, as in Spain with the expulsion, first, of Muslims and, later, of converts to Christendom who were regarded as a potential fifth column.60 This culminated in the 1609 banishment of the Moriscoes after a surveillance and persecution that was a form of ‘internal war’. This banishment was contrary to Spain’s material interests, as the Moriscoes were a major labour source, but it contributed to the country’s reputation as the defender of Christendom. Anti-Catholicism in England can be seen as a lesser instance of the same attitude. The domestic character of strategic culture and planning tends to be neglected but is a constant feature and one that is more important to the forming of external policy than tends to be appreciated. It is misleading to trace the roots of the latter to external factors alone. Part of the question, however, relates to the definition of what is external as opposed to internal. In other words, the concept of strategic culture presupposes the existence of a polity capable of perceiving interests and problems. The extent to which this polity meant more than a ruling group opens up the issue of state-building, as well as the definition of states, or, more simply, the idea of us and them. A sense of identity appears to have owed much to conflict, but the process of identification was far from static. The idea of Germanness, for example, took shape after the tenth-century Saxon emperors began to take armies into Italy, and legends about earlier migrant bands of soldiers, for example Trojans, played an important role in accounts of particular German ‘descent groups’.61 In the Low Countries, a verse account of the battle of Worringen of 1288 served as an epic

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for Brabant. In the thirteenth century, in both England and France, the idea of ‘statehood’ emerged, as opposed to the earlier natio, in its original meaning of people of a common descent. This territorialization was related to the development of a sense of political community separate from the monarch, and this served as an alternative framework to that summarized by the term ‘feudalism’. Nevertheless, the political system, and thus the designation of goals, remained focused on the monarch. Indeed, royal gloire helped to integrate heterogeneous groups into the gradually emergent ‘states’. A focus on the sixteenth century indicates continuity alongside the change that so often attracts attention. New geopolitical realities, most strikingly transoceanic European empires, and the major extension of the Turkish empire, did not lead to radically new governmental assumptions or structures. Instead, pre-existing ideas of rulership were treated as of infinite extent. Conceptually, there was nothing in between universal rule and the authority of ordinary power-holders, and the notion of power was very much that of a personal gift held by an individual or an office. Great powers were thus to be ruled and governed in the same way as second-rank and other powers were ruled and governed. Indeed, there was no structural leap in type of government linked to geographical range. This was to be demonstrated anew from the 1550s as Muscovy spread rapidly to the south and, more markedly, to the east; indeed, by the 1630s, to the Pacific. The scale and long-term importance of this expansion also indicates the need to avoid any simple navalist conception of European expansion.62 So also does the major expansion overland from existing transoceanic possessions in the New World, an expansion that was to be key to geopolitics, both in the New World and as far as its relationship with the rest of the world was concerned. The absence of a structural leap in governance linked to geographical range was a matter not simply of the agencies of authority established to rule distant possessions but also of governmental systems at the centre for handling the issues and problems created by range of rule, not least those problems summarized today in terms of strategic overreach. By modern standards, this failure to create new structures and systems would imply a lack of functional understanding of great-power status, but this is not a particularly helpful concept to employ when considering the rulers of the period. Their status assumptions and territorial imagination were far more like those of earlier imperial rulers, an echo also recorded in their iconography and in other aspects of their self-image, and this indicates an important continuity. If Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Magnificent ruled a state, the Ottoman Empire, that was different to the personal empires of Chinggis Khan and Timur the Lame, that reflected not so much a new attitude but, instead, the impact of the past. In the case of the Ottomans, this impact was a question both of greater continuity compared to the far-more-personal empires of Chinggis and Timur and of taking over the structures of Byzantine rule. Similarly, the Mughals took over the Sultanate of Delhi from the Lodis after their victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, while in Persia (Iran) the Safavids defeated the Aqqoyunlu Confederacy in 1501–3, completing the conquest by 1510. Persia, however, lacked the administrative structures seen in Byzantium, let alone China, which was conquered by the Manchu in the seventeenth century. Was Europe different and, if so, did this mean progress on the route to modernity? An emphasis on the supposed new monarchies of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, such as France and England,63 might suggest that there was indeed a contrasting

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path. This can be treated as a consequence to, or cause of, difference with the non-West, but that is to put too great a weight on new monarchy. Furthermore, it is likely that war, and the need to prepare for it, had a more major impact than is generally appreciated on all states, whether Western or non-Western, in encouraging responsiveness to circumstances, and, thus, rationalization, professionalization and the search for new alliances domestically and internationally. For China, for example, it seems inappropriate to postpone this issue until the European military impact in the nineteenth century. A degree of modernity can be seen not only in the element of consensus in domestic and international alliances but also in other spheres, including economic progress, social development and the application of science. All can indeed be noted not least (but not only) in western Europe, and there were direct applications for European power, for example, the use of the compass in helping long-range navigation out of sight of land. It is less apparent that socio-economic factors, supposedly generic, indeed specific, to western Europe, whether or not described in terms of the rise of the middle class, can be seen in helping account for the power projection of the period. Indeed, an element of the accidental or contingent can be presented. The commercial infrastructure of Europe in the early sixteenth century was not notably more sophisticated than that of earlier centuries, when the Italian city states and the Hanseatic League had together provided considerable range and sophistication within Europe. These economic groupings had not, however, been linked to powerful states, or, looked at differently, the states of the period had not provided opportunities comparable to those offered in the sixteenth century by Spain. It was able to draw on Italian and German financial and mercantile networks, in large part because of the range of its power within Europe, especially, in the person of Charles V, in both the Mediterranean and southern Germany. This range was a consequence of the dynastic agglomeration resulting from the marital diplomacy that had linked the Habsburg, Burgundian, Castilian and Aragonese inheritances, scarcely a sign of modernity. Nevertheless, the availability of finance and of commercial networks ensured that it was possible to exploit Portuguese and Spanish transoceanic expansion by more than the smash-and-grab practices that were certainly important in the early stages of conquest. These networks provided opportunities for German and Italian interests to gain protection through cooperation with Spain, as others sought to do with France, while also supporting the development of these states’ naval and military strength. The varied strength and sophistication of these networks helped ensure that navies and armies were of different effectiveness. This was an important contributory factor to their success or failure, interacting, for navies, with contrasting responses to changes in maritime technology, commercial opportunity and power politics.64 A good example of commercial networks was provided by the development of sugar production, first in the islands off Africa in the fifteenth century, particularly Madeira (where Portuguese settlement began in 1424) and then in the coastal regions of Brazil settled by the Portuguese.65 This involved movements of labour (slaves from Africa), as well as technology (sugar mills), produce (sugar to Europe) and capital (to finance the system), and these movements required resources, including ocean-going ships more seaworthy than the very large barge-like ships of the fifteenth-century Chinese admiral Zheng He, as well as expertise and security. The European empires were not alone in providing the context for such activity, but, thanks to transoceanic expansion, they offered a geographical range that permitted new commercial systems. These were to be

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sources of profit and, thus, government revenue and also to constitute links that were to be seen as a key basis and, thus, definition of power. The agglomeration resulting from Habsburg marital diplomacy could be matched elsewhere in Europe, albeit not at the same scale. For example, although the lack of children to the brief marriage of Francis II (r. 1559–60) and Mary, Queen of Scots ensured that the dynastic union of France and Scotland proved abortive, the lack of any grandchildren to Henry VIII ensured that there was a dynastic union of England and Scotland in 1603. Had the marriage of Charles V’s son, Philip II, to Mary Tudor (r. 1553–8) in 1554 proved fruitful, then the dynastic board would have looked very different. From the modern perspective, this suggests a major tension between dynasticism and modernization. State-building of the latter type is generally understood as resting on more profound foundations than dynasticism, but this may be seen as a teleological view, not least because dynastic loyalty could provide a political cohesion more lasting and stronger than that offered by a powerful individual ruler. As a result, dynasticism could offer continuity, one very different to that of successful modern states but not without weight in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ironically, dynasticism plays a role in some modern states, such as Congo, Syria and North Korea, with sons automatically succeeding fathers in power. Dynastic continuity in the early modern period was not simply a case of Christian Europe, but, as an instance of the questionable nature of European exceptionalism, was also seen more widely. New political entities were given dynamism by their rulers, and this was as true outside Europe as of the new monarchies in the latter. This was seen, for example, with the Sa’dis of Morocco and the Mughals of India. The founder of the latter dynasty, Babur, descended from Chinggis Khan and Timur, was another instance of the extraordinary military potency of Central Asia but also showed how this could have lasting political weight by creating a new state. In part, this rested on Babur’s conquest of the sultanate of Delhi in 1526, but his successors, particularly his grandson Akbar (r. 1556–1605), greatly extended the empire far beyond this span.66 That the Mughal Empire remained powerful until the early eighteenth century raises the question of how best to assess the strength of states. From the later perspective of nationalism, these states appear weak, because they rested on the support of a small elite. Nationalism, as a term implying a socially comprehensive and insistent mass movement, indeed cannot be applied to states prior to the nineteenth century, for it was the changes of the period—stronger states, liberation struggles, improved communications, national systems of education, mass literacy, industrialization, urbanization and democratization—that were crucial preconditions, although important ideological and intellectual changes were also involved. Prior to the nineteenth century, nationalism has to be understood more as a case of national consciousness, and this consciousness interacted with other forms of identity that were often more insistent, not least regional forms.67 From that perspective, it is unclear that earlier Western polities had particular strengths as proto-national states. Indeed, to take a different perspective, Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India and Ming, and later Manchu, China all ruled populations that were larger than any Western states. This was despite serious ethnic, religious and regional differences within them, certainly in Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India and Manchu China. These differences were not the reason for a lack of mass consent, for such consent was

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not required by the rulers of the period. Nor did these differences prevent cooperation at the elite level. Thus, the Hindu Rajput nobility adapted to Islamic Mughal rule under Akbar, not least providing troops.68 Rather, however, than cooperation essentially only at the elite level being seen as a source of weakness, it was the case that Western empires could also rest on similar patterns of consent and cooperation. This was particularly true of the larger ones, such as those summarized as Austria, Poland, Russia and Spain. Moreover, a Breton or Provençal perspective on early sixteenth century France or a Welsh perspective on England would suggest that the situation there was little different. Emphasizing consent and cooperation, to both of which prestige was important, throws attention back on individual rulers and on their competence understood in terms of the political culture of the age. This was a parallel to military leadership and, again, much rested on charisma and the ability of individuals to inspire respect and elicit backing. Such an emphasis is far distant from the mustering of resources necessary to keep armies in the field or to pay for government. Such resources were necessary, but, again, consent was a key component. If government at one level was a means of furthering power by extorting resources for the pursuit of policies that reflected the interests of rulers, the willingness to contribute resources rested in part on consent, however much it was a consent interspersed with flashes of violence. In furthering this consent, the vitality of intermediate bodies, such as town councils or merchant guilds, was important. They could mediate between and reconcile the interests of central government and localities, in a way that could not be done by centralized bureaucracies and their local agents,69 which, together, were far weaker than was to be the case by the late nineteenth century. This ability to mediate and reconcile was exceptionally important in imperial and multiple monarchies, such as the Spanish Habsburg inheritance and the British Crown, in which local elites were successfully integrated and co-opted through voluntary coalescence.70 The role of government was anyway modest by modern standards, not least in social welfare. The emphasis, therefore, is again on cooperation through alliance practices. This might seem to explain how states worked, rather than how they prevailed over rivals and became more powerful, but alliance-making and dissolution were also crucial to conflict, to setting sides, to obtaining results and to securing them. This is at marked variance with modern assumptions, based as they are on concepts of total war, but these assumptions are a misleading guide to the early modern period and, arguably, to aspects of more recent times.71 Indeed, it is necessary to bring together the dimensions of war, first as conflict between armed units and, second, as an attempt to impose a political solution. The former takes on meaning in the context of the latter. This is clear from the Dutch Revolt: the military successes of the Spanish Army of Flanders under Alexander, Duke of Parma in the 1580s were valuable precisely because they were related to the rallying of the Walloon nobility in the south to Philip II, but they were less useful further north in the face of continued Protestant opposition.72 Similarly, in Ireland, it is necessary to consider civil warfare in its political context, with religious divisions and aristocratic factionalism interacting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a far from fixed fashion with English attempts to impose control. The ability to coerce and elicit cooperation implies that the argument about European multipolarity needs to be rephrased. The usual approach to international relations is to suggest that clashing regional hegemonies helped prevent any single hegemon within

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Christian Europe—in short that the balance of power was normative; but that is too simple and mechanical an interpretation. Instead, as also later with Louis XIV of France in 1670–2 and with Napoleon, especially in 1810–11, rulers proved only too willing to accommodate themselves to the dominant power. For example, in the 1610s, England and France rejected earlier hostility to Spain and, instead, cooperated with it. In Germany, Charles V in the 1530s and Ferdinand II in the 1620s benefited from the extent to which the position of the Holy Roman Emperor enjoyed support across confessional divides, and most German princes also rallied to the Emperor in the late 1540s and the late 1630s, after Habsburg victories at Mühlberg (1547) and Nördlingen (1634) respectively. Rather, therefore, than discussing matters such as ‘reach’ and/or ‘over-reach’ in terms of a state system supposedly conforming to structural norms, it is necessary to note the part of contingent factors in preventing the establishment of hegemonic power. One was the role of religious antagonism in lessening the possibility of war termination through compromise and thus making it difficult to cement victory and consolidate imperial reach. This helped ensure that Philip II had less success with the Dutch Revolt which had a Protestant kernel and, increasingly, identity, than with opposition in Aragon, Italy and Portugal. It would be a mistake, however, to see this as the unique factor. Resource issues, for example, were important in Spanish failures against the Dutch in the 1600s, and it is also necessary to consider the flow of campaigning, in short not to demilitarize military history.73 Religious opposition, furthermore, could be defeated: Bohemian Protestantism was successfully overcome by Austrian forces in 1621 and French Protestantism in 1626–9. Nevertheless, the Protestant Reformation not only made it impossible for Philip II, with his rigid Catholicism, to compromise but also undermined the practice of political incorporation that was the basis of the cohesion of states and empires.74 There is an analogy with the impact of liberation ideas on the European colonial empires in the twentieth century and of liberal consumerism on Communist empires. Equally, however dependent on consent or ‘soft power’, the path to political incorporation was paved by military activity. Consideration of the latter reintroduces the idea of overstretch when attempting to explain contrasts between Spanish failures and the successes of other powers, such as, eventually, England in overcoming Spanish-backed Catholic opposition in Ireland in the 1600s, and the French in suppressing the Huguenots (Protestants) in the 1620s.75 This approach, however, then has also to address Spanish successes, as well as the role of priorities in partly accounting for such success and failure, at least through the allocation of resources. The issue of priorities returns us to the debate about agency versus structure, and, on the whole, an emphasis on the former is a much more accurate guide not only to how rulers acted but also to how they responded to what would otherwise appear as constraints. Wars, simultaneously, arose from the pursuit of goals and were also exercises in expediency, both politically and militarily, but that neither ensured success nor dictated failure.

3 Seventeenth-century crises, 1590–1680 The idea of the development of Western European maritime power as being a key turning point in the transition to modernity, and of modernity arriving with an early modern period that began at the close of the fifteenth century is questionable, as was discussed in the previous chapter. It is particularly questionable for the period covered by this chapter as the European expansion that had been so notable in the sixteenth century became less prominent in the seventeenth, with the key exceptions of Siberia and the eastern seaboard of North America. Rather, however, than thinking in terms solely of the relationship between the West and non-West, it is also necessary to note similarities between the situation in both in this period, not least the crises of major empires. Thus, in the 1640s, the Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman, Persian, Muscovite, Spanish and British empires all faced major problems, which, in some cases, were crippling in the short term.

The West checked Alongside this, there was a geopolitical continuity in which there were multiple centres of major power within Eurasia, with the Atlanticist world important and profitable but only able elsewhere to have a limited impact away from coastal regions. This position was repeated in Africa where Portuguese expansion was held in Angola and Mozambique.1 An understanding of the strengths, but also weaknesses, of Atlantic European states also raises the question of how best to conceptualize lesser powers, as it is not adequate to present them as passive spectators of the advance of Western strength. Instead, the wellestablished portrayal of multiple centres of power needs to be refined in order to include lesser states. The border between the West and the non-West ran around the world, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean. The pace of the Muslim assault on European Christendom greatly slackened in the late sixteenth century. Habsburg success in checking the Ottomans at Malta in 1565 and in defeating their fleet at Lepanto in 1571 was important, although the Ottomans swiftly rebuilt a fleet and used it to capture Tunis in 1574. In large part, the key element was the Ottoman concentration on war with Persia from 1578 to 1590, a conflict that brought together competing territorial interests with rivalries between different Islamic tendencies. After 1566, in contrast, there was no largescale campaigning between the Austrians and the Ottomans until 1593. Furthermore, the Muslim threat also slackened, albeit to a more marginal extent, because, having ended long-standing Portuguese attempts to dominate Morocco by crushing its army there at Alcazarquivir in 1578, killing King Sebastian in the process, Moroccan expansion was, in 1590–1, directed across the Sahara against Timbuktu. The nature of regional power, in terms of capabilities, opportunities and tasks, was shown by the fact that the Moroccans

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exploited their victory to seize Portuguese bases in Morocco,2 whereas Philip II of Spain was able to conquer Portugal in 1580, his successful pursuit of his claim to its throne.3 At the close of the period, the Ottomans were again on the offensive in Europe: they mounted a massive, and eventually successful, invasion of the Venetian colony of Crete in 1645–69, an attack on Austria in 1663–4, another on Poland in 1671–6 that led to territorial gains, an attack on Russia in 1677–81 and, finally, a major, albeit unsuccessful, advance against Austria in 1683. More generally, the extent to which there was an Ottoman decline can be queried,4 and the Ottomans definitely thought of themselves as a great power, a view summarized in a memorandum to Ahmed I, informing him of the accession of James I of England in 1603. This stated that James ‘has presented his submission to Ahmed’, a complete fiction but indicative of the Ottoman mentality. At the time, there was no technological imbalance in weaponry between the Ottomans and Christian Europe.5 With the exception of the Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683, these conflicts have received insufficient attention in the literature. For the middle decades of the seventeenth century, this is focused, instead, on conflict between the Christian powers, not least the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the Franco-Spanish conflict of 1635–59 and the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–4. However, a consideration of the Ottoman assault, which followed a long period of Ottoman conflict with Persia that ended only in 1639, provides a questioning context for the habitual focus on Western expansion in this period. Moreover, throughout the seventeenth century, the striking phenomenon is of Old World states thwarting Western seaborne empires: Japan versus Portugal in the 1630s; China versus the Dutch in the 1620s and 1660s;6 and the Mughals versus the English in the 1680s and 1690s. For example, a Chinese fleet intimidated the Dutch into abandoning the offshore Penghu Islands (Pescadores) in 1602. In 1622, another Dutch fleet occupied the islands and began to construct a fort. They also threatened to attack the Chinese coast unless the Chinese accepted Dutch commercial demands. Refusal to comply led to Dutch attacks on towns and shipping later that year. In 1623, a compromise reached by local representatives was rejected by their superiors, on both sides, and the Dutch tried to capture Chinese merchantmen bound for Spanish-ruled Manila. Early in 1624, the Dutch raided the Chinese coast, but the Chinese sent a large force that occupied most of the main island and cut the fort off from its water supplies. This led the Dutch to agree to evacuate the position, and they did not subsequently attempt to reverse their loss.7 In 1688, the French garrisons in Siam (Thailand) were expelled after the pro-French ruler was overthrown in a coup.8 Western setbacks, however, were not simply an issue of military capability and advantage. For example, the Portuguese presence in Asia suffered from a lack of capital and relative uncompetitiveness,9 contrasting markedly with the integrated and profitable Portuguese slave and sugar economy of Angola and Brazil. This weakness was, in part, a testimony to the limited impact of what is seen as the globalization of the period. Western exploration and expansion had brought new relationships, but their economic and fiscal impact was not as great as that created by nineteenth-century expansion, in large part because of the much greater intensity and range of links arising from the latter. Furthermore, there was an important reaction against Western expansion and the resulting globalization. This can be presented in terms of the military opposition to Western territorial expansion, but, in East and South Asia, both expansion and reaction

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were focused on commercial and cultural relationships. Hostility to the Westerners culturally came not only from the Islamic world but also from Japan, where there was a violent response to Christianity and internationalism in the early seventeenth century. In 1639, in response to the Shimabara rebellion, a Christian millenarian movement, the Portuguese were expelled, and in 1641 the Dutch were forced to move their commercial base to an island that was easy to isolate. Overseas travel by Japanese was severely restricted. As with many developments seen in international terms, there was also a domestic agenda, with the Shogun, Iemitsu, seeking to increase his power over the nobility, but the response to Christianity, perceived as an ideological challenge, was also crucial. The Chinese reaction was not as hostile, but there was no adoption of Western norms or at least means of doing business comparable to that of the late nineteenth century. On the one hand, failures should not be taken as a comment on Western strength, because only a portion of their efforts were devoted to long-range power projection. For example, Russian achievements east of the Urals from 1582, which included the foundation of Tobolsk, Yatuksk and Okhotsk in 1587, 1632 and 1647 respectively,10 were peripheral, not only to Europe as a whole, but even to Russia itself. Russian rulers focused on struggle with Poland, Sweden and Muslim forces west of the Urals, whether those of Kazan, the Crimean Tatars or Ottoman forces themselves, and not on issues further east. In large part, this was a matter of practicality, particularly as far as the distant Far East was concerned; but goals and priorities played a more significant role, and understandably so as Polish forces were able to seize Moscow in 1610–12. Furthermore, conflict between Western powers lessened their overseas impact. Portugal in Asia suffered from Dutch commercial competition backed up by superior Dutch naval power.11 On the other hand, the limitations of Western naval power12 and the ability of the Old World states to thwart Western seaborne pressure contrasts obviously with the situation two centuries later. This suggests both a need to explain what was specific to the nineteenth century and to qualify the idea that there was already a clear Western superiority in the seventeenth. The latter draws attention to the need to appreciate Western power in specific contexts—for example, the Caribbean but not the South China Sea—and also indicates the limitations of presenting the period from 1500 as a whole in terms of Western superiority. From that flows again the problematic nature of analysing great powers in terms of Western states alone.

Crises within states As far as the seventeenth century is concerned, crisis can be variously dated. There is a long-standing debate on the causes and character of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis. Indeed, insofar as crisis is concerned for this period, it is possible to adopt a wider chronology, not least looking back to the late sixteenth century. Whatever the chronology, it is relevant to point to widespread elements as responsible for grave difficulties, including climate deterioration, economic and demographic downturn, fiscal crisis, social problems and political issues, not least the problems of multiple states; although, at the same time, there were significant differences between particular

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countries. Religion, for example, played a major role in the crises in France from the 1560s to the 1620s, but not in that in the 1640s. Divisions among the royal family were important in India, but not in Spain. The collapse of distant authority was a problem for Morocco, which lost control over Timbuktu, but was not an issue for Russia. More generally, it was very difficult to get administrative systems to work effectively, and this regularly affected the military, including armies regarded as effective, such as that of early seventeenth-century France.13 The largest-scale crisis was that in China, where, from the accession of Wan Li in 1572, there were weak emperors, increasingly arbitrary central government, oppressive taxation and growing financial problems. But for these problems, late Ming China might have made a more pronounced effort to oppose the spread of Western influence—Spanish into the Philippines, Spanish, and then Dutch, into Taiwan, and Russian to the Pacific— but this is unlikely as Ming strategic culture was not focused on overseas activity. Moreover, the strongest overseas challenge for China was that from Japan in the 1590s. The two powers competed for dominance of Korea which Hideyoshi, the bellicose Japanese leader, saw as a springboard for an advance on Beijing, a goal that was of great symbolic importance to him. That, again, is an important qualification to the emphasis on Western powers as driving the narrative of global relations. In the event, the Japanese were defeated by the Koreans, who had significant Chinese assistance. The fate of the struggle reflected specific military factors, particularly Korean naval skill, rather than the equations of resources. The Japanese defeat ensured that the most serious external challenge for China was to be that from the Manchus to the north-east, while the efforts required to defeat the Japanese exhausted the Chinese treasury and led to a failure to maintain defences against invasion from the steppe. The problems of Chinese government also encouraged both rebellions and a quest for power among ambitious leaders. Benefiting from the crisis created by Manchu attacks, Li Zicheng, a rebel who had become a powerful regional warlord, captured Beijing in 1644 and provoked the suicide of the last Ming emperor, Ch’ung Chen. Li proclaimed the Shun dynasty, but his army was poorly disciplined and he lacked the support of legitimacy, powerful allies and an effective administrative apparatus. Legitimacy was a crucial measure of power as it made it easier to cooperate with authority. This assessment has to be tempered with an acknowledgement of the degree to which polities and people accommodate power however illegitimate, but, far from disproving the role of legitimacy, this simply means that it is necessary to consider it in particular conjunctures. Longstanding cultures and political systems in which rulership is fused with religious authority, or, indeed, has a sacral quality, are apt to put a greater premium on a legitimacy based on longevity and continuity than those where such authority is lacking. The collapse of the Ming dynasty, and thus of the Chinese frontier defence system, gave the Manchus, who had been pressing China hard, and with considerable success, from the north-east since 1618, their opportunity to conquer China; and this underlines the close relationship of domestic and international developments. The overthrow of the Ming also highlights the important contrast between the fate of governments and that of empires. The Ming failed totally, but, despite opposition from Ming loyalists, especially in Fukien which was overcome in 1659,14 and the subsequent serious rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1674–81), the Manchus rapidly created a new, stronger Chinese empire that was a fusion of Ming with Manchu elements.15 In doing so, they benefited

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from the extent to which China was a bureaucratic state alongside a dynastic empire. The latter incorporated the former more so than in the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, none of which rested on a single bloc similar to China in the Manchu Empire. As an indication of the problem of defining and applying concepts, in some respects the assimilation by the Manchus, like earlier Inner Asians, of Chinese culture was a strategic overreach: they were unable to maintain their own identity in the face of overwhelming numbers and some cultural superiority, particularly in terms of technology, and the necessity of adopting Chinese culture in order to rule the conquered. The overthrow of the Stuarts in Britain, as a result of defeat in the First (1642–6) and Second (1648) Civil Wars, followed by the Parliamentary conquest of Ireland and Scotland, also did not lead to the collapse of the state or, looked at differently, of an empire that controlled not only the British Isles but also important overseas colonies. Britain, indeed, became stronger under the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments of the 1650s and, despite resource problems, took a strongly assertive line in war with the Dutch and Spain, and also in Baltic power politics. By extension, this opens up the conceptual difficulty of distinguishing between the weaknesses of governments and that of empires, or, looked at differently, of differentiating between short- and longer-term crises. This is a problem with arguments about strategic overreach. Too frequently such arguments build on the approach of the rise and fall of empires and use overreach as trigger and/or evidence of decline, or even fall. In that sense, the overreach is the trigger point, an assessment that offers a socialscience equivalent to the Classical notion of hubris. Whether overreach is any more accurate as a concept than hubris is unclear however. The specific issue in considering seventeenth-century China is that the problems that helped cause crisis for the late Ming period did not pose a comparable problem for the early Manchus. This raises the issue of how far interpretations of decline are overly specific to a particular chronological conjuncture, in this case China in the early seventeenth century, and unable to provide a longer-range assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of individual states. Another instance from the same period is the work on Spain’s undoubted crisis in the 1640s.16 This is a crisis in which overreach, in the shape of excessive commitments and unrealistic assumptions, is readily discerned, but insufficient weight is given to the ability of Spain to overcome much of the challenge, not least the revolts in Catalonia and Spanish Italy. Similarly, the Mughals, one of the leading land military powers in the world, encountered serious setbacks—for example, from the Ahom in the valley of the Brahmaputra, also in Afghanistan, and, from the 1650s, from the Marathas of the western Deccan, but the centres of Mughal power did not collapse. Moreover, the Deccan Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda were annexed, and Mughal control of northern India was maintained even when the Mughal focus was on conflict with the Marathas. More generally, the difficulty of assessing the strength and resilience of individual states is related to an ambiguity of crisis that is relevant because it suggests that serious problems—of economics and/or overreach, do not have to lead to breakdown. In the midseventeenth-century world, challenges to empires were both domestic and external, with the two often closely linked. For example, across much of Europe in the 1640s, domestic tensions channelled and exacerbated the role of war in creating policy disputes and financial pressures, that both weakened crown—elite ties and challenged links within composite or multiple monarchies. At the same time, these, like other crises revealed the

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strengths of prevailing political systems and the role of existing geopolitical links. This is because the difficult economic, demographic and social circumstances of mid-century did not lead to a sustained fundamental challenge to the bases of society, while major states weathered the storm. This ability to weather storms was a matter not only of domestic crises but also of international counterparts. For example, the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the New World largely survived French, English and Dutch assaults.17 The Dutch attempt to conquer Brazil in 1630–54 was the most serious challenge that the Portuguese colony faced until the successful independence movement of the 1820s. The Dutch failed there,18 and also in retaining control of Portugal’s captured Atlantic African bases, and both the Spanish and Portuguese New World empires displayed a longevity that contrasted with that of the Dutch. In the 1640s–70s, their New World empire largely succumbed to Portuguese reconquest and English conquest: capturing New Amsterdam in 1664 and renaming it New York. The English were also able to capture Jamaica from Spain, but their Western Design of the 1650s had been aimed at far more profitable Hispaniola, and that had failed. There were other signs of resilience on the part of empires usually seen as on the decline, if not anachronistic. The failure of the Habsburgs to achieve more success in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the Franco-Spanish War (1635–59) was not the product of clear-cut differences in strength between them and their opponents. During these conflicts, the Habsburgs also secured important positions, not least the suppression of Protestant opposition to Habsburg rule in Austria and Bohemia,19 while retaining most of the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). In the last stages of the Franco-Spanish conflict, Spanish weakness was important, but both sides were under serious financial pressures; English intervention on the side of France was significant; and France was not in a position to dictate terms in 1659.20 Far from seeking the answer to Spanish success or failure, in its respective spheres, in overstretch, or in a putative military revolution, or in a process of European modernization that left Spain redundant, it is more useful to put an emphasis on the combination of military professionalism and resilience deployed by Spain.21 The Spanish military can, therefore, be located not for example as inherently overstretched, or as anticipating one revolution, or aspect of a revolution, and suffering, in turn, as others did likewise, but rather as largely adept responders to a very extensive range of commitments.22 Fitness for purpose is a key criterion in judging effectiveness and capability, but it is one that is ignored or underplayed with the customary emphasis on military revolutions,23 a revolutionization of military analysis also seen in discussion of the 1990s and 2000s (see pp. 205–7). Instead, post-war downsizings of armies and navies in the seventeenth century indicated that, as today, force structures were adapted to purpose. This was an aspect of the dynamic interaction of strategic cultures with the very volatile international relations of the period, each involving the particular dynastic strategies or individual drives of rulers. Spain was an example of a reconciliation between crowns and social elites in the late seventeenth century that helped strengthen the major states. This reconciliation owed something to political pressure, as in the suppression of the French Frondes and the struggle of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, the Great Elector (r. 1640–88) with the Estates, but also much to the marginalization of religious heterodoxy, so that the elites enjoyed a coherence that earlier had been challenged as different religious

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movements spread, most prominently Protestantism in Catholic Europe. This marginalization proved the basis for a supplementing of dynasticism by a more robust, because more widely diffused, nationalism that acted as an integrative practice,24 although nationalism is not to be understood in nineteenth-century terms. The reconciliation of crowns and elites thus provided the basis for a process of domestic consolidation and, at least attempted, external expansion by a number of states, including Austria, Britain, China, France, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the last of which is mentioned earlier in the chapter. In terms of stability, this reconciliation was most effective when aristocratic elites were integrated not only into armies but also into bureaucracies, as this gave a peacetime coherence that was otherwise lacking if warfare was the means of unity.25 Furthermore, in the absence of such integration, unity was more problematic in the event of serious defeat. Spain, the leading Western imperial power in terms of extent of territory or number of subjects, recovered to a certain extent from the travails of the early 1640s, not least regaining Catalonia from French-backed rebels in 1652.26 However, although reliable statistical indices are limited and of restricted value, the Spanish empire, both in Europe and overseas, was weaker, in absolute and, even more, relative terms, than a century earlier. Revisionists have qualified the impression of collapse,27 and it is particularly noteworthy that, in the 1710s and 1730s, Philip V of Spain (r. 1700–46) was able to take important international initiatives to which other powers had to respond.28 At the very least, in relative terms, nevertheless, there was a decline in Spanish power. In part, this was a matter of political weakness under Charles II (r. 1665–1700), but there were also more long-term problems. Strategic overreach was not the key issue because, once free of the Portuguese link, a link that led to overseas vulnerability to Dutch attack, late seventeenth-century Spain was able to protect the bulk of its overseas territories with relatively few problems. Even the British, with their considerable experience in amphibious warfare, were to be unable to take Cartagena (in modern Colombia) in 1741,29 and were to find Havana a tough nut to crack in 1762, although capture both Havana and Manila that year they did, prefiguring American success at the expense of Spain in 1898. Within Europe, the core ‘foreign’ possessions of the Spanish crown, those in Italy, were also held fairly easily in the seventeenth century. Those from the old Burgundian inheritance, the Spanish Netherlands (most of which were retained) and Franche-Comté (which was finally lost in 1678) proved more problematic, although the growing constituency of international interest against Louis XIV of France brought a key measure of support for Spain in the 1660s, 1670s and 1690s. Spain’s possessions north of the Alps were only totally lost as a result of the end of the legitimate male line of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty in 1700. The problems of Spanish power instead related to structural issues in the Spanish imperial commercial system, with the benefits of empire not feeding through into the creation of prosperous, strong and influential economic interests in Spain or its colonies. This was not due to naval competition by the Dutch, France and England. Instead, the alliance system of the Spanish empire worked to the benefit of non-Spanish subjects of the King of Spain, and, increasingly, to wider European merchant and financial circles. As a result, there was no powerful lobby for urban mercantile and financial interests as a key part of the Spanish political system. The lasting consequences of this were significant; not only the inability to derive the benefit that might have been assumed from

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empire but also the absence of a grounding for subsequent large-scale industrialization. This, however, cannot simply be seen as a failure of empire, because, alongside the argument that links the economic problems of the Mediterranean to the ills of the Spanish empire, not least fiscal pressures arising from taxation—in other words, strategic overreach—there is also the suggestion that there were more profound causes for the relative economic decline of southern Europe. These include soil depletion, a harsh social regimen and cultural factors that did not aid investment in trade and industry.30 The cultural interpretation of Mediterranean decline includes the association of trade and industry with groups and tendencies that did not find favour with dominant ideological, political and social identities. Thus, trade and industry were associated with urban independence or Jews or Protestant powers or liberalization. Similar factors can be seen at play in the discussion of the relative economic weakness of eastern Europe. This can be attributed to political factors, not least the growing weakness, both domestic and international, of Poland from the mid-seventeenth century, but it is also possible to focus on more long-lasting social, economic, political and ideological factors, including religious and cultural practices. The accuracy of this interpretation, however, can be questioned, not least the association of Catholicism with an opposition to economic enterprise.31 It is also necessary to note the impact, on intellectual assumptions about countries and states, of the structuring and restructuring of the European spatial imagination in the early modern period, especially in the eighteenth century. Both the Mediterranean and eastern Europe were increasingly seen as backward.32

The issues of expansion ‘Europeanness’, or Western values, each, in practice, very diverse, were not a cause of relative success, unless that is a characteristic construed to reside only in the successful Atlantic powers; and, even then, any oceanic determinism has to allow for the very different trajectories of Portugal, Spain, France, the United Provinces and Britain. An understanding of the limitations of ‘Europeanness’ as an explanation for success, indeed, provides an insight on the relationship between West and non-West discussed at the outset of the chapter. If a political account of the very varied fate of individual European states is emphasized, this comment on the far from consistent impact of ‘Europeanness’ on the world scale can, however, be discounted by suggesting that the failure or difficulties of some of these states outside Europe—for example, Portugal’s difficulties around the Indian Ocean in the mid-seventeenth century33—was itself part of the competitiveness of a multipolar Europe and that this competitiveness contributed to their aggregate strength vis-à-vis the non-West. From this perspective, Spain’s failure to defeat its Dutch, French and Portuguese opponents between 1621 and 1668, or the damage done to Poland in 1647–67 by Ukrainian rebels and Russian and Swedish aggression all become aspects of Europe’s strength. This, however, is a problematic view, not least in comparative context. European powers were scarcely alone in being under domestic and external pressure. Indeed, an action—reaction model in which crisis led to revival can be used also to help explain Ottoman, Mughal and, above all, Chinese resurgence from mid-century. In comparative terms, as far as this criterion was concerned, the European powers did not enjoy a

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distinctive trajectory. Nor, adopting this perspective, were they all especially successful. Austria did well from 1683 to 1720, particularly against the Ottomans, but, prior to 1683, the recovery from the profound crisis of the early years of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had not conspicuously improved Austrian performance nor indeed confidence in confronting the Ottomans. Leopold I of Austria (Holy Roman Emperor, 1658–1705) could be presented as a protector of German freedom against the Ottomans precisely because they were a threat. That he was also seen as a protector against Louis XIV served, however, to underline the challenge for European states from within Christian Europe. Given conflicts between France and Austria in 1673–8, 1688–97, 1701–14 and 1733–5, the question that arises is how far the competitiveness of the European powers weakened them vis-à-vis the non-West, rather than strengthening them in a neoDarwinian process. This is certainly a reading of the impact of the First World War and, even more, the Second World War, and it may be asked why a different approach should be taken for earlier periods or states. For example, the large-scale Rebellion of the Three Feudatories within China (1674–81) prevented Chinese action that might have limited Zunghar expansion in Turkestan. As a reminder that it was not only in Europe that multipolar systems existed, these conflicts were, in part, products of regional systems such as that within Europe involving Russia, Poland and Sweden. Particularly for Russia and Poland, this rivalry, in part, provided the definition of great-power status as success for one entailed failure for the other. Russia faced an existential threat from Poland during the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century,34 and by the 1650s and, even more, 1700s presented such a threat to Poland. Greater Russian strength owed something to her increasing import of Western expertise and military technology, and its steady improvement in developing a military machine capable of sustaining long-term offensive warfare, although leadership and other contingencies also played a role, not least in Russia’s success in overcoming the challenge posed by Charles XII of Sweden and his Ukrainian allies in 1708–9. As a reminder of the complex character of multi-polar systems, earlier, in the seventeenth century35 and the 1700s, Sweden had done more damage to Poland than to Russia, which helped the last against Poland. An emphasis on the weakening consequences of conflict between European powers does not mean that they were prevented from making major gains at the expense of the rest of the world between 1590 and 1680 simply by their divisions. Such an argument against these divisions had been one made by advocates of Crusading, but it overlooked the extent to which, irrespective of European efforts, the task was simply too great. For 1590–1680, this can be refined by considering the two spheres of expansion, on the peripheries of Christian Europe, and across the oceans. In the first, there was a measure of competition between the European powers with a potential for expansion, but once Poland lost its struggle for primacy with Russia, this ceased to be a key factor. As yet, competition between Austria and Russia was not important, and, until 1914, despite confrontations, and a short-term conflict in 1812, it did not reach the level of rivalry seen between Poland and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In contrast, in the Atlantic West, there was more profound and direct competition between the maritimeimperial powers. This could also entail the search for local cooperation against rival Europeans, most obviously in North America but, in the following century, even more prominently in India.

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Economics also played a role in this search for cooperation, which was central to the way in which empires were transnational organizations drawing on broad networks of connections.36 The quest for profit was important, both to European settlement across the oceans and also to the determination to seize bases, land and trade from competitors. This quest, however, did not ensure or define capability or effectiveness in relations with nonEuropeans, and it was important to seek local collaborators in a system of shared benefit, particularly so in East and South Asia, in East Africa, and in the African slave trade.37 For example, on the Gold Coast, the Swedish African Company was able to play a role in the 1650s because the Futu elite wanted to balance the influence of the Dutch West India Company. Their cooperation was crucial to the establishment of new trading posts. Cooperation was a matter not only of trade but also of military and political support.38 Hostility to the Dutch was also a factor in the Asante Treaty with Brandenburg in 1680 which led to the establishment of a base at Gross-Friedrichsburg. The slave trade is particularly instructive, because it also underlines the extent to which the European powers and economies were not the only ones that were expanding. The weakness of the leading European colonial power in Africa, Portugal, together with the contrasting strength of rival, non-Western slave traders, was demonstrated in East Africa. Fort Jesus, the mighty Portuguese garrison in Mombasa, fell in 1631 to the Sultan of Mombasa, and, having been regained, in 1698 to the Omani Arabs. The Portuguese presence north of Mozambique was thus lost, and a European territorial presence on the Swahili coast did not resume until the 1880s, when Germany and Britain established bases there. Insofar as comparisons can be made, European traders did not enjoy coercive advantages in Africa any greater than those of their Arab counterparts on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa, while those of Moroccan and other slave raiders operating across the Sahara, and from the sahel belt into the forested regions further south were probably greater. The major European advantage rested on purchasing power. This derived from European demand for colonial goods, the resulting prosperity of plantation economies in the Americas and, thus, the integrated nature of the Atlantic economy; but the Europeans did not have a monopoly of purchasing power. If the emphasis is on purchasing power, then a key element in the slave trade becomes not only the conflicts within Africa that produced slaves, but also the patterns of credit and debt that transmitted this purchasing power, opening African society to demands for labour. In this approach, the undercapitalized nature of the African economy emerges as important in creating a reliance on European credit, with the same being true for other external sources of credit in the shape of Arab slave traders.

Knowledge and the West A period in which, outside Siberia and North America, Western power did not significantly increase invites consideration from the perspective of how far it provides explanations for the subsequent disparity between Western and non-Western capability and effectiveness. Any long-term account that focuses on scientific knowledge and application as aspects of this capability would direct attention to this period, not least to the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the seventeenth century. The medieval church had

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originally set its face against any systematic scientific enquiry, on the grounds that man was only intended to know the mind of God as interpreted by itself. Early Protestants, similarly, although rejecting the role of the church, believed that all necessary knowledge was to be found in the scriptures. In the early seventeenth century, however, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) popularized the idea that God actually intended man to recover that mastery over nature which he had lost at the fall: along with the Protestant Reformation, this mastery was part of the preparation for the second coming of Christ. For Christians, this was the goal of history and, thus, the ultimate event of power that was sought. However much realist strategies were followed in international relationships, they were subordinate to this subsuming narrative. This was one of a divine purpose manifested in direct providential interventions and of a daily interaction of the human world and wider spheres of good and evil, Heaven and Hell. This was a world of malevolence, where the Devil and witches were real, part of the varied legions of evil. The role of the dark in the life of the imagination was both aspect and product of a more generalized sense of fear. Knowledge was seen as a help in the struggle with evil. In light of Bacon’s argument, it is unsurprising that scientific enquiry became not only a legitimate pursuit but almost a religious duty for the devout Protestant. This idea became immensely influential among the English and Dutch intelligentsia of the mid- and later seventeenth century, and had major long-term impact in preparing the way for the Scientific Revolution. The laws on scientific reactions developed by Robert Boyle (1627–91), Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and others sought to establish clear causal relationships with universal applicability. This was an important intellectual development that also had a long-term impact on Christian Europe’s capability in economic and military developments relative to those of other societies. The advance of measurement, for example of time, encouraged higher standards of accuracy and precision, while the emphasis on observation, experimentation and mathematics, seen in astronomy, chemistry, physics and other branches of science, provided encouragement for information-gathering and for the use of data to help both decision-making and cycles of testing policies and then amending them.39 As a consequence, there was a relative strengthening in European capability and effectiveness,40 one in which the analysis of problems, as well as knowledge and its application were crucial. This was accentuated by the state sponsorship of applied education, such as the establishment, in the 1680s, of a centralized system of French marine education that focused on the teaching of hydrography and mathematics and also the encouragement of navigational instrument-making. Mechanical application was weak in comparison in Chinese science. Furthermore, knowledge itself was to be not only an enabler of Western power but also an application of it. The Scientific Revolution helped ensure that in a world that was to be increasingly understood in scientific terms, and manipulated accordingly, these terms were Western and linked to other aspects of Western culture. As generally with big-bang accounts of change, it is necessary to offer qualifications. First, new scientific ideas were frequently heavily dependent on earlier learning;41 second, aspects of this learning that clashed with what is seen as the Scientific Revolution remained strong. Many, for example, did not accept the new cosmology. Aside from Ptolemaic geocentricism, the Aristotelian ideas that had been prominent at the close of the Middle Ages remained important. Third, whichever scientific ideas were followed, it

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is unclear how far they affected attitudes towards government. It is attractive to draw a linkage between new science and governmental practices and political assumptions. However, the process was far from clear-cut, and scientific terms or resonances can, just as easily, be understood as part of a vocabulary used to make other ideas or interests appear plausible. An assumption of knowledge as clear-cut, readily appreciated and easily understood is facile. Furthermore, the employment of this teleology to explain Western capability in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is particularly inappropriate, because the social grounding and governmental support for knowledge and applied knowledge were limited compared to the situation by the close of the nineteenth century. There is also evidence that the situation in some non-Western states in the early modern period was less bleak than was subsequently to be the case.42

The case of maps Nevertheless, it would be foolish to neglect the earlier use of knowledge, and inappropriate to neglect the opportunities for doing so in order to consider the relative effectiveness of the West. Such discussion has usually focused on the development of weaponry, which, particularly in the form of ballistics43 and the boring of cannon, represented the application of knowledge, and successfully so, although the direct connection between science and military technology was not as great, prior to the late eighteenth century, as is sometimes suggested. In shipbuilding, the French in the eighteenth century utilized new scientific ideas, such as the work of Leonhard Euler on fluid resistance and floating bodies, and in 1752 established the Académie Royale de Marine at Brest. However, it is also appropriate to consider mapping as that was important to the predictable, long-distance use of maritime capability. Indeed, maps were a testimony for the quest for power. They recorded aspects of control and also portrayed how best to further it.44 China had an important early history of mapping. By the first century AD, the Chinese were possibly employing both the scaling of distances and a rectangular grid system. Subsequently, they were also to adopt the mariner’s magnetic compass and the printing of maps before these were introduced into Europe. Chinese advances, such as printing by engraving on wood blocks, were, it appears, adopted by Islamic traders and thence passed to Europe. Chinese nautical mapping originated at the latest in the thirteenth century. For example, Zhu Siben’s fourteenth-century world atlas included maps showing the Philippines, Taiwan and the East Indies. However, the chart based on the voyages of Zheng He as far as the Red Sea and East Africa in the early fifteenth century is a pictorial representation that could not be used to establish distances. More generally, there was no equivalent to the massive expansion in cartographic knowledge that the Europeans gained from their expeditions. China was central to the Chinese worldview, and other peoples were very much on the fringe, not an attitude that encouraged any deep engagement with the outside world.45 Compared to China and the Islamic world, South Asia has a modest pre-modern cartographic record. Incised potshards carrying plans of monasteries exist from the

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second or first century BC, but the first clear map dates from no earlier than AD 1199– 1200: a bas-relief in a stone depicting a mythical continent. Religious culture, particularly Hinduism and Jainism, was the dominant theme in Indian mapping. This was linked to astronomy and required the development of astrolabes and celestial globes. As a result, astronomical painting was a prime form of early Indian mapping. More conventional mapping was influenced by other cultures, first Islam and then by Europe. Other Indian maps included roads or river routes shown in strip form—maps of pilgrimage routes, for example. Indian navigational charts from the seventeenth century have also been discovered. Indian mapping conventions differed from those in Europe: the maps did not carry a scale, as size was considered in terms of importance, not distance. Moreover, few Indian maps had compass roses or a geographic grid, and there was no standardization of symbols. Indeed, the reproduction of landscape with geometric exactitude was not regarded as the goal of mapmaking. Islamic mapping was diverse and included celestial globes and world maps centred on Mecca. There appears, however, to have been less of an emphasis on the more practical use of such maps, and Arab traders do not seem to have employed charts.46 In Europe, in contrast, increasingly from the late fifteenth century, the pace of change in what was a practical map culture moved ahead rapidly. There was an increasing use of the compass in surveying and mapmaking from the late fifteenth century, and of scale from the sixteenth. In place of impressionistic, symbolic or spiritual landscapes, more emphasis was placed on producing a scaled-down image of the physical world as an aspect of secular knowledge-based policy-making. This was of particular relevance for the recording of a world of which European knowledge was expanding rapidly with voyages of exploration.47 As an aspect of government clearly linked to a determination to use knowledge, new maps were supplied not only by individual mapmakers but also by institutions created to train navigators which, in addition, organized the production of charts. These schools were linked to the Casa de Contratación at Seville and the Almazém de Guine India at Lisbon. A hydrographic office was established in the Almazém at the close of the fifteenth century in order to control, as well as ensure, the flow of information. The office was responsible for the issue of charts to pilots, and also for securing their return. Another key aspect of Western power-projection was seen in the willingness to transfer technology to colonial bases rather than centralizing activity and control. Just as naval shipbuilding was carried out in colonial ports, so with mapmaking. The Portuguese base of Goa in West India developed as a centre, producing nautical charts and, from the 1580s, maps of parts of Asia as a whole. The Europeans also rethought the world, producing a projection that made most sense for compass work, pilotage and navigation—especially in the mid-latitudes. The 1569 projection devised by the Fleming Gerhardus Kramer, whose name was Latinized as Mercator, treated the world as a cylinder, so that the meridians were parallel, rather than converging on the poles. Angles, and thus bearings, were kept accurate in every part of the map. A straight line of constant bearing could thus be charted across the plane surface of the map, a crucial tool for navigation. This was a huge achievement, unmatched by the Arab traders of the Indian Ocean, who were unable to use a grid of latitude and longitude in order to create practical navigation charts.

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To achieve the navigational goal, the scale was varied in the Mercator projection, and thus size was distorted, magnifying the temperate land masses at the expense of tropical ones. The projection therefore highlighted the imperial world of Portugal and Spain and was an appropriate pre-figuring of the success of Philip II in creating the first global empire—the first on which the sun literally never set. This reflected the establishment of an important Spanish presence in the Philippines from the 1560s, one furthered by cultural assimilation that owed much to the nature of local society and religion.48 Named after Philip, the Philippines was an aspect of another example of European power: classification and appropriation through naming. The maps themselves, however, reflected a major weakness of the Europeans, in that it was easier to give detailed shape to coastlines than to the interior of continents. Diego Gutierrez’s 1562 map of Spain and Central America offered a complete account of the coastline, which captured the general configuration, but the interior was poorly covered. In Amsterdam in 1614, Prince Johann Ernst of Saxony was impressed in the meeting room of the East India House by the large chart in which ‘the Asian navigation with all winds and harbours was depicted, beautifully drawn on parchment with pen and partly painted’.49 The Dutch East India Company had no need for similar maps of overland routes in Asia, and this was true of other mappers. For example, the 1666 map of Madagascar by the French cartographer Etienne de Flacourt was largely accurate for the south-east of the island, where the French had established Fort Dauphin in 1642, but not for other parts. Similarly, Giacomo Gastaldi’s map of Africa (1564), the largest yet to appear, and the map of India in Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Major (French edition, 1667), contained much error for the interior. On the other hand, this twelve-volume atlas contained nearly 600 maps. This was an indication of the information resources that the Western quest of power could draw on. The Europeans knew more about the world than other cultures. In the case of the Dutch East and West India Companies, ships’ pilots began to keep logbooks and to produce reconnaissance charts employing sheets of paper with pre-drawn compass lines. Company ships were provided with navigation instruments, and an East India Company mapmaking agency was established in Amsterdam from 1616. The companies also regarded surveys with information on crops and town plans as essential instruments for management and planning. This mapping was integrated with oral information from sources such as the native population into medium-scale topographic maps of the colonies. This was mapping for economic benefit. Not only was mapmaking different to that in the non-West, but the context also contrasted greatly with it. There was an important role for government in Western mapmaking in the early sixteenth century, but the shift was very much towards a more entrepreneurial system, one that could draw on the resources of wider mercantile networks, not least extensive information flows. This was a product also of a shift towards artistic production for the market rather than for individual patrons.50 Greatpower competition also played a role. Mercator and Ortelius, the key mapmakers of the late sixteenth century, both lived in Antwerp, a cartographic centre not only because of its role in publishing but also because it was ruled by Philip II, although Mercator had to flee from Antwerp. In the seventeenth century, in contrast, Amsterdam was the key cartographic centre. It benefited from the economic and political decline that affected its rival Antwerp in the

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seventeenth century and also from the maritime role of the United Provinces. Aside from access to information, the United Provinces also offered an environment that was relatively unregulated, both politically and economically. Dutch map production indeed was driven by the search for profit and was able to respond to the demand for information. Dutch production of maps was dominated by competing publishing houses, especially those of the Blaeu and Hondius families. In their competition, they drew on maps from any source they could, and this competition helped to ensure a constant process of updating. The cartographic role of the Dutch, however, was to be challenged by their two major foes in the late seventeenth century: France and Britain, information proving a valuable indicator of power status and one that tends to be underrated in materialist interpretations that focus on economic production. In the case of France, maps were seen as an important way in which to glorify Louis XIV, as well as to provide information that would help French overseas expansion. French cartography, however, was uneasily balanced between a world of permission and government controls and that of opportunity and entrepreneurial activity. Nevertheless, the role of scientific institutions with geographical goals in France was important as they not only reflected credit on the monarch but also expressed the idea that reason would lead to a graspable progress.51 In the long term, France was not to succeed in becoming the most dominant map producer. Instead it was London that took over the role. Its commercial freedom was similar to that of Amsterdam, and, like that of the Dutch, the British mapmaking world benefited from an expanding global system of trade and activity. In contrast, other cartographic traditions do not appear to have developed in a comparable fashion to that of Europe, not least because of the Europeans’ application of advances in mathematics, instrumentation, navigation and an understanding of the globe—although there is still need for much research on this point. ‘Mapping’ is not necessarily cartographic, and different cultures might have different notions and techniques of ‘mapping’ of their empire’s resources. Ottoman land and revenue surveys and descriptions of frontiers were all also forms of mapping and afforded the Ottoman government knowledge of its resources, as well as helping to delineate the otherwise porous frontier of the empire.52 In the Ottoman Empire, although there were significant efforts to acquire information about adversaries in order to inform policy-making,53 the use of maps was far more restricted than in Christian Europe. The panegyric Ottoman royal histories produced by the official court historians contained some illustrations from the 1530s, and several of these were maps. The works were in manuscript, however, and their wider impact was limited. The Ottoman cartographic tradition was found wanting by the late seventeenth century and, from the 1680s, began to be replaced by borrowings from Europe. In China, the first maps to be based on triangulation, the system of measuring a straight line over the Earth’s curved surface, were not produced until the early eighteenth century, and they relied on supervision by the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Régis. The West was distinctive in a demand-driven interest in maps that encouraged continual innovation in product and that drew on an awareness of new sources of information. This demand was public as well as governmental. An understanding of the degree to which mapping was incomplete encouraged the development of cartography as part of a continuous process of the acquisition, integration and resolution of information. The Europeans were not the only imperial powers but within both Europe and their

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transoceanic possessions map use was most pronounced. This was an aspect of science in which the West already had a clear advantage by the sixteenth century and one that rapidly increased. The resulting capability offered both specific uses, in terms of the understanding and application of power and also a significant ability to conceive of the world as a unit and to integrate with this an understanding of particular regions. This conception was important to an ability to define the quest for power in spatial terms.

Conclusion Such a tendency was an aspect of strategic culture, but this should not be pushed too far because there was also a jurisdictional approach to territory that was at variance with more geographical considerations. Thus, the building blocs of international relations and warfare in Europe were long-standing territories defined by legal considerations. The importance of dynastic considerations54 to rulership helped underline this approach to international relations and is a qualification to the tendency to make ahistorical comparisons of great powers across the centuries. Even if their circumstances may contain apparently similar elements, the goals and nature of decision-making were very different.

4 The rise of the great powers, 1680–1774 The rise of the great powers in this period is conventionally seen in terms of that of Austria, Britain and Russia. That is appropriate as far as Europe is concerned, but also woefully Eurocentric as an analysis. The list of expanding great powers must include Manchu China, the state that conquered more territory than any other in the century 1660–1760. Moreover, far from writing off the Ottomans, it is also worth considering why the Ottoman empire was able to revive after crises, reviving, for example in the 1650s– 1670s, in the early 1690s, the early 1710s and again in the 1730s.

China, Russia and Persia Concern about China’s role in the geopolitical situation was very different in the eighteenth century to the situation today, in large part because the Chinese then were not interested in relations with distant countries, whether politically or as sources of the supply of raw materials, let alone in order to provide arms and military expertise. Instead, Manchu China continued the earlier system of an international relations based on Chinese hegemony and the offer of tributes by neighbours, albeit with a geographical span that was expanded as a result of the eventually successful Manchu determination to end the steppe problem by defeating the Zunghars.1 The Manchus indeed fought to expand. Their conquest of Ming China in the mid-seventeenth century had infused the Chinese military with a new dynamic and a greater ability to operate successfully in the steppe. Indicating, however, the range of fitness for purpose, this did not lead to a military system similar to that of Europe, as cavalry played a larger role in what was in effect a Manchu-Chinese hybrid. The earlier Ming had lacked adequate cavalry because there was a shortage of adequate cavalry horses in China and they were unable to obtain them in sufficient numbers from the steppe. In contrast, the Manchus had horses, and this helped them sustain their attacks, which is a reminder of the more general importance of the availability of horses to military power across much of interior Asia.2 The chief characteristic of the Manchu-Chinese military was a certain remorseless persistence. The army was impressive in its operational range, acting in very different terrains, an ability that repeated that of the Mongols. Military capability rested not on weaponry but on the ability to deliver power at a great distance, matching the situation within the European world: organizational capability, range and developments (for example, those of the British navy) were more important than military technology in terms of absolute and relative power. Manchu expansionism was imperialistic and for glory and possessions, rather than for resources and trade. Between 1680 and 1760, China occupied Formosa (Taiwan, 1683),3 drove the Russians from the Amur Valley (1682–9) and destroyed the Zunghar empire of

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Xinjiang and also won control over Tibet and annexed eastern Turkistan. During this period, the Chinese also suppressed a number of major rebellions. Despite this, the Manchu-Chinese state was no successor to the medieval steppe empires of the Mongols and Timur. Furthermore, there was no drive to conquer Japan, as the Mongols had sought to do in the thirteenth century, while the frontier with Russia fixed in 1689 and 1729, which excluded Russia from the Amur Valley, was seen as acceptable. Demands made in the 1680s that the Russians withdraw beyond Lake Baikal and thus abandon their Pacific coastline were not repeated, but the new frontier also represented a Russian acknowledgement that they could not advance south into what became the Vladivostok region, let alone into Manchuria. Aspirations that were viable in the late nineteenth century were not feasible two centuries earlier. No other Asian state had comparable power to China. Several of the lesser-rank states, however, were able to operate in this period without having to respond significantly to Western pressure. This was true of both Burma and Siam. Persia was put under pressure by Peter the Great, but it was an Afghan invasion that overthrew the Safavids in 1721–2, and the Russians subsequently were unable to maintain their position in Persia. Indeed, their short-term success against Persia owed more to the weaknesses of the latter, in the face of Afghan invasion followed by Ottoman attack, than to Russian capability. Russia’s eventual failure in Persia in this period has a wider relevance because of what it shows about the perpetual problems of acting as a major power in a distinct context. A failure to conquer could be explained by relative lack of interest in the goal, as well as by the strength of the resistance. The discussion of expansion in a specific region has to be understood both in terms of expansion at the periphery and with reference to priorities at the metropole. Indeed, Russian policy indicates the extent to which capability in power projection was less important than prioritization. Between 1697 and 1763, successive opportunities for conflict with the Ottomans were not pursued because of Russian concerns about European power politics, although the extent to which there was a consistent Russian strategic culture is unclear, not least because such an argument underrates the role of politics in Russian policy.4 Russia’s success in defeating Sweden in 1709, and again in 1742, and in overawing Poland in 1710, 1733–5, and 1768–72, was the precondition for the campaigning against the Ottomans in 1711, 1735–9, 1768–74, and 1787–92. In 1739, in contrast, when the Russians were making major advances at the expense of the Ottomans, the French encouraged the Swedes to threaten Russia in order to distract them. In the event, Russia made peace with the Ottomans because its defeated ally, Austria, had already done so, ceding Belgrade. Moreover, as a typical instance of the extent to which client states did, and do, not follow the lead of ‘their’ great power, the Swedes did not attack Russia until 1741. As far as Persia was concerned, the presence of Peter the Great with the advancing Russian troops in 1722 was an indication of the significance of the campaign, one that was possible because the lengthy Great Northern War (1700–21) with Sweden had ended.5 Peter’s presence, which matched that in campaigning against Sweden, for example at the battles of Narva (1700) and Poltava (1709) and in 1716, and against the Turks in 1695, 1696 and 1711, is a reminder of similarities with Asian empires such as those of Nadir Shah of Persia in the 1730s and 1740s.6 The ruler as general in the saddle is also a qualification of the notion of modernity understood in terms of bureaucratic governmental structures and practices, or, conversely, suggests that modernity cannot be

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applied to Russia in this period. Presence on the spot solved communication problems before radio made it possible to control from the rear. This also leads to the question whether empires in which the military ruler acted as the leading general, as with Peter the Great, William III of Britain (r. 1689–1702), Frederick the Great of Prussia (r. 1740–86), or later Napoleon, who governed France from 1799 to 1814 and again, briefly, in 1815, can be regarded as great powers because of their dependence on the success of such a personal rule. Does great-power status require a certain longevity, and, if so, does this vary, and how? Is dynastic continuity the key? The Romanovs, Manchus and Bourbons could provide it, but Napoleon could not. Napoleon did not produce a lasting European empire for France, but Peter, who sought to Westernize Russia, did greatly transform Russia’s power. However, he did not do so in all spheres, while his lasting impact owed something to the short-lived nature of the antiWesternizing reaction during the reign of his grandson, Peter II (c. 1727–30), under whom the capital was moved back to Moscow from St Petersburg. Peter II’s life was cut short by smallpox, and the Westernizing policy was resumed under his successor, Anna, but Peter II’s reign is a potent reminder of the role of contingent factors.

Imperial expansion In 1723, Baku and Rasht had been occupied by the Russians, and Shah Tahmasp of Persia was persuaded to yield the provinces along the southern and western shores of the Caspian. However, a Persian revival under Nadir Shah and the loss of many soldiers to disease led the Russians to abandon their gains by the treaties of Rasht (1729, 1732) and Gence (1735), although a wish to focus on the Ottomans was also relevant. This Russian failure is instructive for what it suggests about a standard interpretation of imperial expansion, that which puts the focus upon cooperation between colonized and colonizer in explaining the expansion, consolidation and maintenance of imperial systems. This approach can indeed be extended by considering these systems as alliances of interest in both periphery and metropole and by arguing that the process of cooperation with empire was part of the search for assistance in local struggles. Thus, imperial powers were manipulated by their local allies, just as imperial policies were shaped in accordance with the contention of interests at the centre. If this approach is adopted, it is first necessary to note that the Western powers were not unique in their capacity to anchor expansion in this fashion. Thus, Ottoman expansion into the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or the Mughal counterpart in India in the sixteenth, and the Manchu one in China in the seventeenth, all demonstrated the capacity to elicit local cooperation and consent. Each case was different, not least in terms of administrative continuity, but it is clear that there was nothing distinctive in this sphere about Western expansion. The proselytizing character of Western powers in the New World on behalf of Christianity could indeed pose serious problems, not least in contrast to the irenic nature of some, but by no means all, non-Western counterparts, but, in Asia, the Western powers largely avoided proselytism. Moreover, the Ottomans looked to the most tolerant of the schools of Muslim law. Conversion to Islam was important in some parts of the empire, especially Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo, and this has greatly affected the recent history of the Balkans, but the bulk of the Christian and Jewish

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subjects of the empire did not convert, and this posed few problems for the Ottomans prior to the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. In Hungary, for example, there was neither forced Islamization nor mass conversions.7 Second, as the example of Persia demonstrates, it is clear that Western powers enjoyed more success in some regions than others. This was not a product of the inherent strength of the powers in question but rather of the particular circumstances of the region. These circumstances included not only the physical and biological environments, with disease being especially important, but also the nature of the local culture and political situation and the character of the relationship with the Western power,8 not least the perception of its strength. For example, it was easier for external powers to fit into local networks if there was a clear sense of a shared interest. Thus, in East Africa, Oman had a greater success in sustaining a presence than the Portuguese had done, in part because its commercial networks into the interior were stronger and the profit created helped to strengthen support for Oman. As a reminder of the multiple character of explanations, Islam also proved important to Oman’s regional status. The Russian presence in Persia, in contrast, neither represented nor created any shared interest, except possibly that of keeping the Ottomans out of the area, which was a pale echo of earlier Christian interest in winning Persian support.9 In the absence of mutual benefit, the Russian presence rested on force, and these units were able to do nothing bar wither in the face of disease. If this was an instance of the oft-used concept of strategic overreach, the overreach was as much ecological or political as military. Moreover, the politics of the overreach should be understood in terms of the absence of local cooperation, rather than with reference to an economic or military model, whether Kennedy’s or that of another scholar. The issues of prioritization in encouraging the persistence of effort, the sequential nature of success and the role of consent in anchoring gains, also all require examination when considering the Western European powers. Again, there is the case of the particular sphere of operations. The French, English and Dutch as much, if not more, went to West Africa, the Caribbean and North America, to fight each other, or the Spaniards and Portuguese, as they went to fight non-Westerners. In large part, that was because other Westerners were the gatekeepers to the opportunities in these regions, and that was a product of Western power projection. Whereas the world of trade in the Indian Ocean and its littoral was shared between Western and non-Western merchants and polities, that was far less the case with the Atlantic. Western strength in maritime power projection remains the case to the present day, whatever the extent of military capability or territorial control on land. This power projection was the basis of Western power, however, not simply because of military factors but also because the sea was a key route for trade and migration. The former brought profit and opportunity, and this encouraged investment, not least in navies and coastal positions, as means to protect and extend this trade. This commitment to large battle fleets became more important in Europe from the mid-seventeenth century.10 Naval power helped sustain transoceanic military tasking, but, crucially, was not itself necessarily a product or source of relative strength on land vis-à-vis non-Westerners. Maritime power projection ensured that Western Europe was able to exploit the bullion resources of the New World, helping to increase liquidity in the Western world and to finance trade with Asia.11 This was particularly associated with Spain and its

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empire, but those who traded with Spain reaped much of the benefit.12 The same was true in the eighteenth century for the gold from the Portuguese colony of Brazil, much of which benefited Britain.13 As a result of this exploitation of bullion resources, the Europeans acquired an important comparative advantage. Asian powers might receive bullion for their products, such as tea and ceramics from China, but access to bullion supplies ensured that Westerners were able to insert themselves into the non-Western world. Maritime power-projection and subsequent capability on land also enabled Western Europe to develop and exploit a hinterland in the Americas that was larger and more economically useful than that of any non-Western power, particularly China in Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and the Amur Valley. This New World hinterland offered the Europeans a host of advantages including, by 1800, relatively low protection costs in the face of native peoples unable to threaten their core settlements, as well as important economic benefits, not least soils, many of these rich, that had not yet been denuded by intensive cultivation, and that, instead, served as a good basis for improved agricultural practices.14 In the period of this chapter, the benefits were largely from the West Indies, Brazil and the southern mainland British settlements in North America, particularly South Carolina. These colonies produced plantation goods, especially sugar, but also including coffee, indigo, tobacco and cacao. These goods had a high value in Western (though not non-Western) markets, and some permitted import substitution: coffee came from the West Indies rather than, as before, from Yemen. As these goods could not be readily produced within Europe, this trade was very profitable and helped to underscore the growth of Western financial and mercantile capital and organization.15 However, the move of European supply sources to the New World, and therefore the increase of relative efficiencies in production within the Western world, was restricted until the late nineteenth century. Then, thanks to the application of steam technology to large ships and to the development of refrigerated holds, it became possible to meet part of Europe’s food needs from the New World, and, with an investment of labour and capital, and a practice of social control, that was less than would have been required to raise European agricultural production in order to meet the demands of the rising population there. Furthermore, such an investment within Europe would have affected the availability of resources for industrialization. In contrast to the gains for Europe from the New World, whichever the century in question, there was no such economic benefit to China or other non-Western states. This was not for lack of territories to attempt to exploit, although the New World was not an option for them. There was no inherent reason why the heavily populated regions of East and South Asia should not have sought colonial expansion elsewhere in Asia, overland or across nearby seas, for example in South-East Asia or the Philippines. It is also unclear why they did not seek expansion more widely, as in Australasia, East Africa and even across the Pacific; although the last was a far greater task than that facing the Europeans in establishing colonies across the Atlantic. However, such expansion was not in accord with the strategic cultures of the ruling groups in East and South Asia, which, instead, focused on the security considerations raised by attack from the Eurasian interior. As Edward Gibbon pointed out in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776– 88), there was, by the mid-eighteenth century, no threat from the Eurasian interior likely to bring down European civilization.16 There was also nothing, for example, to match the

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Afghan attacks on Persia and India in the 1720s and 1750s respectively. The dramatic failure of the Ottomans outside Vienna in 1683 established that this interior was no longer a danger for Europe, a point underlined by subsequent Austrian successes against the Ottomans in the period to 1718. Russia did not enjoy such a clear-cut shift in relative advantage as Austria in this period, but, over a longer period, looking back to Ivan IV’s lasting conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s,17 there had also been a major geopolitical transformation. This was underlined by the long struggle for dominance of Ukraine from the 1640s to the 1730s, one finally won by Russia.18 Compared to this, Russian failures, such as at the expense of the Ottomans at Azov in 1695 and at the river Pruth in 1711, were of limited consequence. Furthermore, in 1719–74, Russia won far more success against the Ottomans than Austria, which, in 1737–9, in its sole war in that period, lost territory after a costly struggle that encouraged a half-century of cessation in its Balkan expansion. The Ottomans, in turn, played no role in Europe’s Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a conflict which found them not only on the sidelines but also somewhat out of the loop on military technology and practice which could be effective against other European powers. Indeed, the European states on the periphery facing Islamic powers, Russia, Poland, Austria, Naples and Spain, were increasingly able to focus on conflict with other Europeans if they chose. Furthermore, as another key element of European capability, the Western European states were ready, thanks to the naval/trade nexus, to provide sufficient governmental support, in the shape of fleets and trade monopolies, to overseas expansion to ensure a valuable addition to the efforts of entrepreneurs. This support was missing in the case of China,19 Japan and the Indian states. The limitations of Western strength on land, however, emerges from any consideration of the power ratios of the slave trade, with the provision of slaves from Africa a matter not of raiding, although that did play a role, as of trade with local rulers, who were able to limit Western control of the African littoral until the second half of the nineteenth century. Given that this was four centuries after the arrival of Western ships along the coast, it is a little difficult to see the narrative of military history for Western Africa as one of Western success. Indeed, the Portuguese faced considerable difficulties in expanding their major African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.20 Moreover, in the nineteenth century, the British found the Asante a formidable problem in West Africa until the 1870s, and, even then, the British victory was in part dependent on local support from other tribes. There were also serious problems in the 1870s for the British with the Zulu in southern Africa. As another instance of the mismatch between force projection and military achievement, or, indeed, endeavour, the Western ability to arrive in Chinese and Japanese waters in the early sixteenth century, seen initially with the Portuguese, did not mean, despite hopes to the contrary, an ability or drive to conquer or coerce until the mid-nineteenth when first the British were successful. While noting the importance of cooperation with foreign rule, imperial expansion should not be separated out too abruptly from the push factors involved in the equations of power. This was particularly true of settlement, which depended on the availability of migrants, on their being able to sail from Europe, and on success in acquiring or seizing land for settlement. Without such migrant flows, the Western presence in the New World would have been similar to that in India, with an important reliance on local native

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cooperation in the port cities that would have had to be created if export economies were to be established. This underlines the problems posed by the Americas to European traders and officials, as there were no port cities like Goa or Malacca already established by the Native Americans. Again, the push factor was important, as migration flows within the Western world varied greatly. This migration fed through into the extent of military strength on the periphery. Aside from the issue of local supplies for regular forces, much of the Western military strength on the periphery, whether in the Americas (South and North, as well as the West Indies) or, for example, the Dutch colony of Cape Town established in 1652, was a matter of colonial militias. The contrast between New France and the British colonies in North America was very instructive on this head. The far greater population of the latter meant that their capacity for raising local forces was much larger, and this was a strategic factor that was operationally significant, most clearly in the capture from France of the crucial port fortress of Louisbourg in 1745 by a force of Massachusetts militia supported by British warships.21 Alongside the disease eco-system, colonial militias were a major help to Spain in retaining New World possessions against British attack. Trade and land were no more polar opposites than cooperation or conflict with natives, but there was a degree of correlation. Where land for settlement was the goal, then it was harder to win native support and, therefore, more necessary to rely on Western regular or (colonial) militia forces, as in North America and Australasia. Even in these cases, however, it did prove possible to win a measure of native support. This was important in conflict with Native Americans and not only in the initial contact stages; and was also a factor in the nineteenth-century Maori wars in New Zealand. It proved far easier to win local support if the goals were political influence or dominance and/or trade, rather than land for settlement. This greatly helped the British, for example, in India. An emphasis on politics and trade was also a factor in Chinese relations with the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the steppe. This always combined military force with a variety of diplomatic procedures—one of the best-known being jimi or ‘loose rein’, which involved dividing and ruling. The steppe peoples similarly raided in order to build alliances and to force the acceptance of commercial links. Violence, thus, was not the natural characteristic of the relationship, but a product of its failure.22 If the role of consensus and the extent of syncretism both repay attention, then it is worth asking why particular states were the beneficiaries. Why, after all, should it be necessary to cooperate with ‘foreign’ states and, if so, why with particular ones? This redirects attention to conjunctures, and, in these, the sway of conflict was especially important. If Transylvanians (in modern Romania) could look to Austria or the Ottoman Empire as rival imperial systems in the 1680s, or Ukrainians could look to Poland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire or Sweden from the 1640s to 1700s, or Indians to a range of local and foreign powers in the 1740s, 1750s and 1780s, it was entirely reasonable for them to assume that the results of these struggles were far from predetermined, and there is no call for modern systemic accounts that assume that they were wrong. Local elites tended to conclude alliances with the permanent power, but it was not always clear which this was.

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The measure of power It was not only that the margin between success and failure was narrow, a point that is repeatedly shown in military history, and one that undermines structural determinism and systemic accounts, but also that the way of judging power lacked precision. Westerners sought to offer such a tool when they discussed matters in terms of a balance of power, and this concept offers much to modern analysis that would seek to quantify power. However, the balance of power was (and is) a problematic concept.23 First, it served as much for policy prescription as for analysis and, as such, was affected by the political contention involved in debates over prescription. Second, as an assessment of strength, it was unclear what to measure and how best to do so. Whereas, at sea, it was clearly helpful to count the number of ships of the line (although that provides no guide to their combat-readiness as vessels or with reference to the availability of crew), it was difficult to assess fiscal strength or military quality. Even if statistics could have been better than they were—for example, for population or government revenues—it would still have been difficult to assess the ability of particular political systems to mobilize strength. Governance depended on consent, and this process of consent was not lessened when states engaged in war. Indeed, the twentieth-century concept of mobilization for total war is a misleading one, as, instead, major conflicts tended to accentuate the need for cooperation. In the absence of such cooperation, there could well be political breakdown or crisis, as in China, France and Spain in the 1640s. Similar points, both in terms of the measurement of power and the value of the theory, could be made about the European economic thought of the period subsequently described as mercantilism. In practice, this was not so much a common body of economic thought resulting in a coherent policy as, instead, a set of familiar biases and accustomed responses to frequent problems, within a context in which much lobbying and writing involved special pleading. Most writers did not favour a competitive market mechanism as the basis for the allocation of investment. There was little appreciation of the free market as an automatic adjusting mechanism, particularly because the pursuit of private profit could be viewed as self-interested and hostile to the public interest, an attitude that revealed and strengthened a bias in favour of control and regulation. Further stress on state activity was provided by the belief that economic activity was both naturally, and actually, competitive. Peace-time activity moreover was seen as the basis for wartime strength. Mercantilist arguments thus downplayed the extent to which domestic and foreign economic activity involved mutual interest, which included a key role for trust, in part as a response to the hazards of risk. The role of trust indicated that trade was embedded in culture. Moreover, trust was a key element in economic activity, including in responding to new technological and organizational innovations.24

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The role of leaders If political, military and economic power could not be expressed in terms of precise measurement, the successful use of this power was dependent on skill—more specifically, the interacting role of personalities, structures and international circumstances. For 1700–1815, this can be seen in political terms by considering the contrasting fates of energetic, military rulers, for example Peter the Great, Nadir Shah of Persia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Alaung-hpaya of Burma, Tashin of Siam and Napoleon. Success and failure were inevitable for none of these. The role of determined and successful leadership also emerges clearly in China. The personal determination of the Kangxi (r. 1662–1723) and Qianlong (r. 1736–98) emperors was crucial to the defeat of the Zunghars, which was the major Chinese achievement of the period. Both made it a personal crusade and pushed hard those generals who were more hesitant about campaigning on the steppe. Kangxi wanted victory, and he understood the transient nature of the possession of territory as opposed to defeating the Zunghars. The Qianlong emperor wished to surpass the achievement of his grandfather by putting an end to the frontier problem. The importance of personality is further illustrated by the role of the intervening Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–36), who launched only one expedition against the Zunghars and did not persist after its failure. Had he ruled as long as his predecessor or successor, the Zunghars might have expanded once again and become a powerful Central Asian empire. Neither was the reign of Yongzheng characterized by major military initiatives elsewhere. Yet this throws light on the difficulties of assessment. Yongzheng was also a great reformer and a very tough emperor. His financial reforms laid the basis for Qianlong’s military successes. It is less clear whether without Yongzheng they would have had this result.

Power relationships It is difficult to know what to make of theories of international relations in light of this inconvenient revenge of the facts. The emphasis on specificity, indeed contingency, which stems from a consideration of particular leaders can be extended to review individual states. For example, the collapse of Mughal and Safavid power in India and Persia in the period 1700–40 at the hands of non-Western peoples was a crucial contrast with the situation in China. These collapses, which have been attributed to the imperial overstretch discussed by Kennedy,25 weakened the ability of both areas to resist Western pressure subsequently. However, it is unclear that the Mughals and Safavids were up to that challenge, while the successor regimes proved more resilient against Western pressure than may be appreciated. Mysore, the Marathas and the Sikhs proved significant problems for Britain in India in 1760–1850, while European influence in Persia was limited for the century after the fall of the Safavids at the hands of Afghan invaders in 1721–2. Mughal collapse owed much to a decline in central leadership combined with the growing assertiveness of provincial governors. The politics of the state was reshaped in

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the process. The decline of the dynasty in the last years of Aurangzeb’s reign, and even more after his death in 1707, provided the governors with the opportunity, and also the need, to reach for power. After a victory over a Mughal army at Shakarkhera in 1724, Asaf Jah, the Nizam of Hyderabad, became in effect independent, sundering what had been one of the major achievements of the Mughals, the control of Hindustan over the Deccan. The Nawab of Bengal also became in effect independent in 1733. The combination of this process with the takeover of imperial power at the centre by nobles helped to ensure a weak and divided response to the Persian invasion of 1739, and some key Mughal figures refused to fight the Persians at Karnal that year. In response to that major defeat, an attempt was made to raise a new imperial central army, but, in 1743, this was abandoned due to financial problems, and by 1748 the empire was totally bankrupt.26 Mughal India developed characteristics of the warlordism seen in China in the 1920s. Some rulers, such as Haidar Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, in Mysore, were dynamic, but British conquests in the 1790s–1810s were to be furthered greatly by divisions among the Indian princes, not least the ability to ensure the support of Hyderabad. Had the Zunghars continued powerful—maybe, for example, prefiguring the Durranis of Afghanistan in maintaining the independence of their homeland—then they might have been in a position to apply greater pressure on China. The Manchus, indeed, feared the creation of a hostile Mongol confederation from the 1690s. The porosity of the frontier operates both ways, and the Zunghars would probably have contested Manchu influence among the Khalkas in Mongolia, as well, possibly, as Manchu control of the Chinese provinces of Gansu and even Shaanxi. This might well have weakened China prior to the onset of European pressure in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to fissiparous tendencies. For example, it might have proved far harder to suppress internal rebellions. Equally, it could be argued, using the challenge—response model, that continued Zunghar pressure would have kept the military centre-stage and maintained the viability of the Chinese armed forces, thus making it less difficult to respond to European pressure. The Indian example suggests otherwise. The military methods and structures appropriate for confronting cavalry armies advancing from Persia and Afghanistan, which was a key problem in Hindustan in the 1730s–60s, as seen with the Afghan victory over the Marathas at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, were not similarly useful against European-style forces. Chinese effectiveness against the Zunghars, indeed, was not readily transferable to strength against European amphibious forces. Chinese expansion reflected the desire to reorder not only the relationship with neighbours but also to control territory. This was not only a theme of non-Western polities but also of their Western counterparts. Alongside the emphasis on trade, there was also a determination to gain and control land. This, for example, was a major theme not only in international relations in North America and the West Indies, especially between Britain and France, but also those between imperial powers and their subjects. Indeed, the issue of control over the interior was to be important in the background to the American War of Independence (1775–83).27 In labour-poor areas, however, the key goal of control was over labour rather than land. The most famous manifestation is the slave trade out of Africa, where the basis of polities was generally control over people. Control over labour as a means and goal of power, however, was far more wide-spread than in Africa. This encourages attention to labour regimes, such as eastern European and Russian serfdom, as an aspect of power.

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These regimes were contested by a number of means, including revolts and flight, and thus force was an integral form of labour control.28

Themes of co-operation Allowing for the interactions of personalities, structures and circumstances, the period saw the expansion of a number of states, particularly Austria, Britain, China and Russia. In each case, it is possible to look to recovery after the mid-seventeenth-century crisis as providing a key element. It is also pertinent to emphasize the role of consensus within the dynamic states of the period. This is a marked contrast to a standard narrative that describes these states in terms of the governing system of absolutism: specifically, the power of the state as defined and measured in terms of larger armies and more sophisticated bureaucracies. That approach, however, fails to probe the socio-political background to this greater degree of force. Volition on the part of rulers was not sufficient. Instead, it is necessary to probe themes of cooperation. Most obviously, the Manchus created a military system that was, in effect, a Manchu—Chinese hybrid. This was not without tension. Indeed, the Manchus, who had conquered China from the north, were much more comfortable with the people and cultures of Central Asia than with those of the south: their Banner Armies garrisoned north China but had little presence in the south. There, the Manchus relied on the Green Standard forces raised from the native Chinese, but they did not allow large concentrations of them, because they were far more numerous than the more loyal and reliable Banner Armies. This illustrates not only the capability brought by cooperation but also the need to manage it carefully. However, in 1677, the use of Green Standard troops was crucial in the defeat of the rebellion of the Three Feudatories. This helped in the consolidation of a new political system in which Manchu tribesmen could no longer challenge the adoption of Chinese administrative techniques, personnel and priorities. This accorded with a key point of the Chinese system in this period, which was to prevent internal disruption, rather than external invasion, of which there was little risk. The ethnic dimension of cooperation was less pronounced in Europe, although it was present, for example, in the Habsburg and Romanov favour for Italian and German generals and senior bureaucrats respectively.29 Irrespective of this, the practice of broadbased cooperation with the nobility, rather than any supposed absolutist agenda of state control, centralization and bureaucratization, brought a large measure of stability to European states.30 This served as the basis for the international conflicts of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, because this measure of stability made it possible to raise large forces despite the demographic and economic stagnation of the period. Thus, politics, not economics, was the fundamental basis of the state system, a point that is of wider chronological, geographical and theoretical relevance. An aspect of this political cooperation was that nobles were provided with employment and their sense of mission was thereby satisfied.31 The armed forces also strengthened the control of social elites over their regions and, particularly, their labour force. Furthermore, this model proved workable when seeking to add territory. Rulers intending to gain land generally sought to do so with the cooperation of the local elites, a

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pattern that looked back to the empires of antiquity and that, in part, reflected their limitations as systems of control.32 Louis XIV of France, for example, maintained the distinct identities of Artois and Franche-Comté when he acquired them from Spain through war (1659 and 1678), and Peter the Great guaranteed the privileges of the local German Protestant nobility when he overran Estonia and Livonia in 1710. Securing the support of the nobility aided Peter’s wider modernization programme, although he adopted a harsher position in Ukraine.33 Newly acquired territories could, in part, be incorporated by recruiting troops, as with Scotland after the Hanoverians acquired the British throne and suppressed Jacobite rebellions in 1715–16 and 1745–6. Scottish troops were to be a key support for British imperialism, as, in the nineteenth century, were Irish troops. Compromise was not simply a case of social elites and monarchs. Territorial states were also combinations of landed power and urban elites, so that the states could derive strength from two different economic milieux, which themselves reflected alliance patterns, including kinship networks. Relationship with government entailed a process of negotiation, sometimes interspersed with episodes of violence. As later with imperialism, processes of negotiation and compromise were also ways in which governance as a whole, and the tasks and powers that central government sought to convey in particular, provided opportunities to solve local problems, affirm local status and participate in the wider community. Yet this local seeking of consensus could also be directed against the demands of central government, and this possibility underlined the conditional quality of the local reception of outside governance. Both reception and conditionality were a matter of responding to wider social, political and ideological currents. If these currents sapped the position of rulers, this could lead to the rapid collapse of the process of government, as local agencies, and the elites that controlled them, no longer felt that governance served reasonable purposes. This situation looked towards the problems that empires were to encounter in the late twentieth century.

Britain Considerable attention will be devoted to Britain in this book, as later to the USA, not in pursuit of a Western-centric agenda but in order to provide a context for consideration of established interpretations of great-power status. By 1774, Britain had become the key Western imperial and financial power, although, ironically, it had done poorly from the first burst of European transoceanic activity at the cusp of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Despite ascertaining the fishing wealth of the waters off Newfoundland, John Cabot’s voyages (1497–8) were very much on the margins of profitable activity. Moreover, in the sixteenth century, English expeditions failed to discover the direct route to Asia they sought through a north-west passage to the north of America or a north-east passage north of Asia and also missed out on the compensation of American bullion that Cortes and Pizarro had seized for Spain. Nevertheless, long-distance seafaring became more important to England as part of a maritime world in which fishing, shipping and trade adapted to the opportunities and problems of longer distances. In 1600, an East India Company was founded to trade by

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sea with South and South-East Asia and the East Indies (modern Indonesia), principally in order to obtain spices. Excluded from the East Indies by Dutch competition, the Company was eventually to form the basis of Britain’s Indian empire. A joint-stock concern, the Company reflected the strength and sophistication of English, particularly London, commercial and financial circles and contrasted with the far greater state direction of most Continental trading companies. The Company was to enable Britain to draw on the wealth of South and East Asia. North America initially seemed a less profitable prospect, but, in 1607, the Virginia Company established a permanent colony at Jamestown, while, in 1620, the Mayflower made a landfall at Cape God, and the development of a colony in New England began. France, Spain, Sweden and the Dutch were also established in North America, but the English were successful against the last, New Amsterdam becoming New York in 1674. Earlier, the Dutch had absorbed the Swedish colony. The British also had island colonies. Bermuda (1613) was followed by colonies in the West Indies: St Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627) and Nevis (1628). The biggest acquisition, Jamaica, did not follow until 1655, but, by the end of the century, a plantation economy was well developed on the British islands. It produced sugar for Britain and other European markets, providing the prime source of profitable re-exports, and was worked by slaves brought from West Africa. Although one among a large number of states involved, Britain became the leading power in the slave trade from West Africa, a trade that led to numerous deaths on the ‘Middle Passage’ across the Atlantic. There was also a plantation economy around the Chesapeake that produced tobacco for export. Initially worked by white indentured labour, this economy also switched to black slave labour. Government support for trade and colonies was important: both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II (r. 1660–85) saw England as a maritime and commercial power. New colonies were founded in the late seventeenth century: Connecticut in 1662, Carolina (named after Charles II) in 1663, New Jersey in 1664, Pennsylvania (named after the Quaker William Penn) in 1681, and New York in 1689. The pace of migration was such that, by 1700, the population in English North America was considerably greater than that in French North America. This was important in the struggle between the two powers for dominance in North America, one finally settled in favour of Britain in 1760, because this population provided local sources of manpower and a stronger local infrastructure to support military activities.34 Furthermore, by 1700, England was the leading naval and maritime power in the world, superseding France, the Dutch and Spain, and dominating the North Atlantic world. Moreover, its overseas trade had risen substantially. This led not only to mercantile prosperity and crucial customs revenues but also to the shifts in diet and fashion seen in such innovations as the import of large quantities of coffee, tea and sugar. International trade, which provided the Admiralty with a proto-intelligence network, focused on the leading port, London, accentuating its importance in the country: its population rose from 200,000 in 1600 to nearly 1 million in 1800. This helped provide a context for policy discussion that was very much dominated by mercantile values and by those that could be presented as mercantile.35 War with France in 1702–13, the War of the Spanish Succession, was important to contemporaries because John, 1st Duke of Marlborough’s victories on the Continent, particularly Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706) and Oudenaarde (1708), played a major

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role in thwarting Louis XIV’s attempt to dominate Western Europe. This helped ensure the multipolar character of the region. In the long term, however, the war was also very important both because hopes of a French-backed Jacobite revanche were thwarted, and due to its imperial consequences. Jacobitism was the movement in favour of the main line of the Stuart dynasty which, in the person of the Catholic and autocratic James II (and VII of Scotland), had been driven from Britain in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9 and replaced by William III of Orange and a system of government and politics in which Parliament played a greater role. This is a reminder of the extent to which strategic culture was greatly affected by domestic politics. The war also brought fresh gains, with Nova Scotia (although not Quebec) captured, and the British position in Hudson Bay and Newfoundland accepted by France. Gibraltar (in 1704) and Minorca (in 1708) were conquered from Spain, reflecting British naval dominance and amphibious capability. International competition and conflict helped mould the development of British government, creating both structural factors and particular pressures, especially those of financing war. This competition also established a context in which domestic circumstances were assessed in terms of relative international effectiveness, leading to interest in new institutions, such as the Bank of England founded in 1694, as well as periodic reforming bursts and a revolution in taxation. Effective public finances proved a major advantage for the British in successive conflicts with France. The latter lacked the fiscal mechanism to match its resources, a key reminder of the need for institutional sophistication and for political support for such innovations.36 Fiscal problems hit the French navy hard during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), although a range of issues led to French naval failure, including poor leadership, not least the dominance of honour, as well as the disease that hit manpower, the impact of British blockade on the supply of naval stores, and ship losses to storms (in 1758) as well as to the British navy (in 1759).37 Effective British finances owed much to the strength of the Anglo-Dutch fiscal relationship after the ‘Glorious Revolution’, and, indeed, Britain’s rise was in part a matter of subsuming the Dutch system, as well as defeating France, just as America’s rise in the twentieth century was in part a matter of subsuming the British system as well as defeating Japan and triumphing in the Cold War. Parliamentary union with Scotland in 1707 was a key aspect of the process of change in Britain, and also an indicator of the way in which, far from being monoliths, great powers could develop. This union reflected concerns about the royal succession— specifically, anxiety that England and Scotland would go for different options when the childless Queen Anne (r. 1702–4) died—and tensions over the ability of Scotland to follow a different line in foreign policy. Furthermore, the civil war of 1689–91 that followed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had underlined the divisions in Scottish society and made rule from London seem more attractive than government by Scottish opponents. The powerful leadership of the Presbyterian Church, fearful of exiled Stuarts and Scottish Episcopalians, accepted the Union as a political necessity. The passage of Union through the Scottish Parliament ultimately depended on successful political management, corruption and self-interest. Alongside the security and political dimensions, there were serious economic problems in Scotland. Much of its economy was in a parlous state, and influential circles in Scotland wished to benefit from the economic possibilities of the far larger English market as well as from those presented by the expanding empire. They were indeed to do so, and Scots played a disproportionately large role in the military and

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commercial expansion of Empire. Nevertheless, the short-term political consequences were distinctly unhappy: a large number of Scottish Protestants rejected the new order to the extent that they were willing to rebel in 1715, albeit without success.38 In 1774, however, the full potential of British overseas power still rested in the future. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution had hardly started: only very small sectors of industry in small, and as yet isolated, districts were affected. Britain stood on the threshold of rapid regional economic change but had hardly yet embarked upon it. There was also no clear-cut strategic culture because, alongside a growing interest in transoceanic power projection, there were also important strategic concerns in Continental Europe, not least a determination to prevent France from conquering the Low Countries as well as the commitment of the Hanoverian dynasty of kings (1714–1837) to their German homeland. This led to policy divisions in government and amongst the public, and those are more generally instructive because there is a tendency to underplay the extent to which strategic cultures are subject to political debate and, not least for that reason, contingent. The course by which Britain became the leading European imperial power was far from easy. Conflict with Spain from 1739 to 1748, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and with France from 1743 to 1748, in the War of the Austrian Succession, did not yield anticipated gains and showed the difficulties of victory. The East India Company did not become an important territorial power in India until after Robert Clive’s victory over Surajah Dowla, the Nawab of Bengal, at Plassey in 1757, while French Canada was not conquered until 1758–60, Quebec falling in 1759 and Montreal in 1760. Nevertheless, naval dominance had already come to play a greater role in the collective imagination, a process that culminated in 1740 with James Thomson’s lines: ‘Rule Britannia, rule the waves/Britons never will be slaves’. Successive victories were to make these lines iconic, and they reflected a potent linkage of naval prowess, oceanic destiny and national liberty. With strength substituted for liberty, this was a linkage that was to be advanced by careful governmental planning.39 George Frederick Handel’s oratorios, with their presentation of Britain as the modern Israel, a people fulfilling a biblical patriotism, lent further resonance to this theme of glorious and exceptional destiny. National identity, political system and maritime character were linked by commentators. John Chamberlayne trumpeted in his Magnae Britanniae Notitia: or, The Present State of Great Britain (1726): Great Britain may be justly counted the principal nation for trade in the whole world, and indeed the most proper for trade, being an island which hath many commodious ports and havens, natural products, considerable manufactures, great encouragement from the state for the sake of customs and duties paid, the breeding of seamen, and the increase of shipping, freedom in religion, the pleasure and healthfulness of our clime, the ease and security of our government; all conducing to the encouragement of maritime trade. As yet, however, this tune did not play in Beijing, as George, Lord Macartney discovered in 1793 when he became the first British envoy there, only to find that China was not particularly interested in a new commercial relationship.40 The connection between the two powers was to be very different a half-century later.

5 A reshaped world, 1775–1860 The world of the great powers changed radically between 1775, when the War of American Independence broke out, and 1860, when British and French forces occupied Beijing in the Second Opium War. The key developments were those distant from Europe, particularly the collapse of European colonial power across most of the American land mass south of Canada between 1775 and 1825 and a marked shift in South and East Asia towards Western power. The last was seen most dramatically in the expansion of British power in India, particularly at the expense of Mysore, the Marathas and the Sikhs, the decline of Chinese power and the enforced opening up of Japan to Western influence. This expansion will be discussed in this chapter, but the later importance of American power ensures that there is also a lengthy consideration of the development of the distinctive characteristics of that power, a development in which political, not economic, factors were key. At the same time, it is important to be wary of a teleology of Western exceptionalism, and it is necessary to consider non-Western expansionism, indeed imperialism, alongside their Western counterparts. This again brings up the issue of variety, with such expansionism common in Africa and Asia, but not in the Americas or Australia. That remark, however, can be sharpened up both geographically and conceptually. Areas that witnessed expansionism can be expanded to include Hawaii and New Zealand, with the unification of the Hawaiian archipelago by Kamehameha in 1791–1810 and large-scale Maori wars in the 1820s. It is also pertinent to emphasize the range of expansionism, which included tribal warfare, as well as that more clearly associated with states. There was, of course, a continuum between the two, but there was also a clear difference between the Apache and China, just as there was between the Cossacks and Prussia.

Britain and France Consideration of the range of power relationships and conflict on the world scale in this period indicates the questionable character of the thesis that the global situation was defined by Western developments, and, in turn, that the latter was shaped by Napoleonic empire-building and warfare. This, however, directs attention to the question of how best to assess conflict in Europe. The suggestion here is that the focus should be on those powers that successfully resisted France: Britain and Russia. The Napoleonic legacy was a weaker France in Europe, with Russia dominant in eastern Europe and influential further west. Indeed, in September 1815, on the third anniversary of the battle of Borodino, Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, reviewed a parade of 150,000 Russian troops east of Paris, alongside the rulers of Austria and Prussia, Francis I and Frederick William III, both of whom were also dressed in Russian uniforms.

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Meanwhile, the European overseas world was dominated by Britain. France’s colonies in 1815 were only those allowed it by Britain, such as a number of now inconsequential bases in India, most prominently Pondicherry, as well as other territories that the British were confident of capturing if necessary, such as Reunion and Martinique. Britain dominated the Western world, and France was in a weaker transoceanic position, both absolutely and relatively, than had been the case both before and after the peace treaties signed in 1697, 1713, 1748, 1763 and 1783 and, indeed, than in the nadir of the French Revolution’s weakness, division and defeat in 1793. This suggests the need to emphasize the geopolitics of the situation, one in which the powers on the ‘edge’ of Europe had a strategic depth that enabled them to resist Napoleon. Yet, the ability to resist was not the same as that of ensuring success. It would be convenient to say that Britain and Russia, as powers that had very varied military tasks and experiences, were thereby more effective and better able to defeat Napoleon; but it is difficult to show that any such transferability of military quality took place. Yet, as far as the global perspective was concerned, it was British success in particular that was important. Due to Britain, France, under Napoleon, was unable to enjoy the benefits of the European hegemony it had gained. The colonial empires of its European allies, Spain, Holland and Denmark, were outside its (and their) control, and the resources that Napoleon deployed could not be used to project French power, both factors that helped Britain safeguard and strengthen its position as the leading Western power. This was a failure that was not inherent in France’s position but one that reflected the relatively low priority of maritime as opposed to continental activities, as well as the successes of the British navy; in short, contingent factors were crucial. Like Louis XIV, Napoleon wanted colonies and a strong navy, but, under pressure, the army very much came first. Like Hitler, Napoleon pursued his colonial plans within (rather than outside) Europe, and this was clearly the focus of his worldview. Although the French navy was constructed in part to maintain communications to the Caribbean, it in effect became little more than an adjunct of the army, and naval strategy was a tool to further Napoleon’s Continental ambitions. The Franco-Spanish fleet destroyed by Admiral Nelson off Cape Trafalgar in 1805 was on its way to help the French army operating in southern Italy. After his expedition to Egypt in 1798, Napoleon’s interest in, let alone commitment to, the world outside Europe was episodic. Furthermore, it essentially arose from interest in harming European rivals, rather than from any sense of France’s role in an expanding Western world. Moreover, Napoleon did not greatly understand either how to further trade, or the dynamics of commercial activity and its relation with public finances. This failing, serious enough in Europe, where it helped thwart Napoleon’s attempt to bar British trade by means of his Continental system, was of even greater consequence beyond the bounds of French power. It helped Britain in the struggle for resource advantage and for alliances. More generally, Napoleon had a lack of strategic vision. A focus on campaigning was no substitute. Discussion of strategic choices is an appropriate counterpoint to a consideration of resources. In the case of Britain, these included political as well as economic factors. Domestic politics generally takes second place to industrial transformation, the Industrial Revolution, in any account of the key British developments from the mid-eighteenth century, developments that are crucial to the subject of this book as Britain then became the most powerful Western state, a position it maintained for over a century. This

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ordering seems appropriate given the extent to which this transformation ended the dependence on previous energy sources. The Industrial Revolution was also important to bursting asunder the apparent nature of time as cyclical and, instead, made clear that the past would not recur, suggesting, as a result, that arrangements based upon it and legitimated by long usage were no longer valid and should be replaced. Yet the importance of the politics of the period was that they helped make this transformation possible. Economic change led to major social pressures and large-scale disruption, but there was no serious breakdown in social or political stability, even when Britain faced the unsuccessful civil war in the empire that led to the independence of the USA (1775–83). In contrast to many Continental states, there was no political revolution, either at the time of the French Revolutionary crisis at the close of the eighteenth century or in the mid-nineteenth century when there were revolutions across the Continent. Instead, 1830 and 1848 were not years of revolution in Britain. This does not mean that hardship and discontent were small scale but simply that, in a comparative context, they, and their consequences, should not be exaggerated, as there is a tendency to do. Economic transformation was seen in industry, trade, finance, transportation and agriculture. The British economy not only changed but also developed powerful advantages in manufacturing and trade compared to foreign states, and this greatly impressed informed foreign visitors, although they were prone to ignore the impact of periodic industrial depressions, which hit hard at the social-welfare system. A culture of improvement lay at the heart of much economic, intellectual and other innovation, and this belief in the prospect and attraction of change moulded and reflected a sense of progress. As an important indication, from 1759, there was a marked increase in the number of patents, which was a testimony to an interest in the profitable possibilities of change. Alongside production, consumption also developed in Britain, with the integration of a national market, which owed much to investment in improved communications, increasingly affecting local production, and with trends in consumption encouraged in newspapers. Consumption helped drive both trade and industrial activity. Commerce was to become a defining characteristic of British society and one that was particularly important in townscapes where markets were supplemented and then largely replaced by permanent shops. The earlier background, particularly in the early eighteenth century, but also with a longer time span of per-capita growth back to about 1600, was also pertinent in the case of agriculture. Developments such as improved crop rotations and better land management through enclosures, whether or not they are presented as an Agricultural Revolution, helped ensure that the same number on the land could feed a greatly expanded number who were not engaged in farming, whether or not they worked in industry or commerce in towns, or on the land. Furthermore, the earlier background of agricultural development and colonial expansion helped support a consumerism that was to be important in encouraging industrial improvement. This serves as a reminder of the need not to see the Industrial Revolution as an overly abrupt shift or one essentially dependent on industrial technology. The nature of industrial activity also changed, with more specialization, as well as a greater division of labour and the growth of capital. A stronger emphasis on the need for constant, regular and predictable labour led to different forms of labour control, including

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factory clocks. For rapid industrial growth, the essentials were capital, transport, markets and coal, and their availability enabled Britain to avoid the limits of the organic economy, that based on the growth of plants, such as wood for fuel. Instead, it was possible to exploit the plentiful supplies of fossil fuels, supplies that gave Britain a powerful comparative background. The use of coal, which had already greatly gathered pace in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provided a major increase in available energy per head and made possible a rise in per-capita living standards in the nineteenth century despite the major rise in population that occurred then. Coal, a readily transportable and controllable fuel, provided a power source that was more effective than its comparable predecessors, wood and charcoal, although water power remained a key source during the eighteenth century. Coal, however, had to be mined and transported, and both these requirements acted as spurs for innovation and activity, especially the construction of canals and railways. Parliament played an important role in easing the process. Faced by the costs of moving coal three miles by pack-horse and barge from his colliery at Middletown in Yorkshire to Leeds, Charles Brandling, in 1758, secured an Act of Parliament ‘for laying down a wagon-way, in order to the better supplying the town and neighbourhood of Leeds…with coals’, the first Act to authorize the construction of a railway. In 1780, a Newcomen steam engine was installed at Middletown, and, by the close of the century, the pit’s average annual output was 78,500 tons. In contrast, in China, the abundant coal in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia was little worked because it was distant from the key markets and faced major problems due to the high cost of transport overland. As a result, coal-based manufacturing did not develop appreciably in China, and therefore the systemic changes in economic activity that resulted in parts of the West were not matched. Steam engines were the icons of the new age in Britain and were frequently depicted in illustrations, although, at the same time, as a reminder of the variety of values and the absence of a single cultural trophe, late eighteenth century Britain also joined in the cult of wild nature that was important to Romanticism and was seen in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Thomas Jefferson, the future American president, visited the Albion Mill, a steam-powered corn mill, when he went to London in 1785; he also travelled to the West Midlands to see industrial plant. Continued change and the search for improvement were important parts of the process of industrialization, with prototypes rapidly developed into readily reproducible effective working machines. Thus, steam engines, which were crucial to mining in Britain, as they pumped water out of the mines, became more efficient in their fuel use and more regular in their operation. In 1769, James Watt, the first to perfect the separate condenser for the steam engine, patented an improved machine that was more energy-efficient and therefore less expensive to run. In 1782, Watt patented further innovations that gave a comparative uniformity of rotary motion and thus increased the capacity of steam engines to drive industrial machinery. The application of engineering knowledge reflected an understanding of Newtonian mechanics that represented considerable social capital which was lacking elsewhere in the world. Such advances in Britain were important because they rested on an entrepreneurial society ready to support innovation (despite popular concerns about the impact on employment) and also keen to search for, and finance, comparative advantage. Moreover, a notion of the common good divorced from dynastic assumptions was a key ideological

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background for the search for political best practice. This ensured that the internal alliance systems that sustained British power, particularly that of land and trade, focused on a public body, Parliament. The American War of Independence, however, indicated that these strengths did not necessarily bring success.

Questions of relevance The standard account of great powers in this period is flawed. Why bother with Napoleon? He was a failure, not only in hindsight but also in his own lifetime. If there was no perverted Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods) equivalent to the Berlin bunker in which Adolf Hitler was to commit suicide in 1945, Napoleon discovered Hell in his own terms when imprisoned from 1815 by the British on St Helena, an isolated island in the storm-tossed South Atlantic. Furthermore, as a military figure, Napoleon failed totally. There was no equivalent to the recovery after the loss of the capital city seen with Frederick the Great of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, or, later, the Americans, first in the War of Independence (when Philadelphia was lost in 1777) and then in the War of 1812 (when Washington fell to the British in 1814). Moreover, Napoleon coped far worse with failure than Louis XIV or Louis XV had done. Louis XIV’s armies had been repeatedly defeated by British, Dutch, Austrian and Savoyard forces in 1704–9, but the French frontiers largely held. The major fortress of Lille was lost to the British in 1708, but there was no Allied march then on Paris, and the French were able to fight on and, indeed, did so with considerable success in the last campaign of the war, inflicting serious defeats on their German opponents in 1714. In 1743, 1757 and 1759, under Louis XV, the French suffered serious blows in Germany, with defeats at Dettingen, Rossbach and Minden but, on each occasion, were then able to regain the initiative. Napoleon, in contrast, was not able to do so after his defeats in 1812, 1813, 1814 and 1815. He attracted the united efforts of the other powers, cooperating eventually to seek his annihilation, in a manner France had not suffered from in the 1740s and 1750s. The question of why study failure recurs when we think about the Germans in the First and Second World Wars and relates directly to the issue of how far, and how prominently, to include powers that were defeated in the list of great powers. Several reasons offer themselves, some historical and some directly relevant today. To list these reasons does not imply any prioritization but, as far as historical factors are concerned, need and opportunity came foremost. Need was a reflection of Napoleon’s repeated success in the 1790s and 1800s, and the wish among others to understand the basis of this success in order to try to repeat it or to know how best to avoid suffering from its repetition. In short, there was a clear obligation to understand Napoleon. This appeared more relevant because the European great-power system did not change substantially for several decades. Indeed, France was to find itself at war, separately, with Russia, Austria and Prussia, within fifty-five years of the fall of Napoleon, in 1854–6, 1859 and 1870–1 respectively. The battlefields in the wars with Austria and Prussia, those of northern Italy and eastern France, were those fought over under Napoleon. So Napoleon seemed relevant, and particularly so because weaponry changed relatively little in the 1820s and 1830s. Opportunity arose thanks to the availability of sources. There was also a

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confidence that the Napoleonic period was crucial to the grand narrative of Western history and that this narrative was the topic for those working on state-building and conflict. For the twentieth century, this seemed self-evident, as warfare between major states dominated attention, and this was the basic theme of Napoleonic conflict. The applicability of this model, however, appears less apparent from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. Now, the focus is on a wider range of conflict and international relations, which reflects the trajectory of both in recent decades. Two spheres are of particular importance: first, conflict between Western and non-Western powers and, second, the dialectic of insurrectionary and counter-insurrectionary warfare. In each case, there was relevant material in the Napoleonic period. The Egyptian campaigns of 1798–1801 provide instructive instances of the former, those in Calabria, the Tyrol and Spain of the latter, and Haiti of both, as well as a prefiguring of the recent problems Western powers have faced in power projection. Thus, the history of France as a great power could be rewritten in order to throw light on current concerns. It is also pertinent, from the narrative of the rise and fall of great powers, to consider how far France’s failure under Napoleon to establish a convincing global position, in the face of British naval power, wrecked its attempt to be such a power; or whether defeat on land in Europe at the hands of Russia was more serious. To argue the case for a different history of Western warfare and international relations involves not only issues of theme and topic but also related questions of coverage. In essence, at the global scale, it is those powers that took a prominent part in conflict between the West and the non-West that deserve more relative attention, whereas warfare between Western powers is generally overplayed. This means devoting more space to Britain, Russia and the USA and less to that long-standing ménage à trois of Austria, France and Prussia. Defeat anyway contributed to France’s relative decline. Over 1 million Frenchmen died as a result of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Moreover, a combination of civil war and emigration disrupted family life. Partly as a result of these, France’s population grew by less than 50 per cent in 1750–1850, while that of England nearly tripled. This contrast can in part be attributed to a fall in the French birth rate arising from the spread of birth control in the late eighteenth century, but repeated choices for war were also important. More generally, it was the Napoleonic era, not Napoleon himself, that was important, not least to British growth and to the Latin American Wars of Independence.

The West in relative position, 1780–1830 At the global scale, the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, from 1792 to 1815, and, even more clearly, that of the Napoleonic Wars from 1799 to 1815, were of great significance for the expansion of Western power relative to that of the nonWesterners. Britain achieved key successes in South and West India, at the expense of Mysore and the Marathas, and this secured its hegemony in the sub-continent, ensuring that it would be an Asian great power as well as an Atlantic great power. Russia was able to establish itself in Georgia in the Caucasus in 1801 and subsequently, in 1806–12, to defeat the Ottomans, at the same time as it faced the challenge of Napoleonic France. The USA made important gains at the expense of the Native Americans.

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It was not the case, however, that Western powers were invariably successful or dominant, as the British discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1806–7. An invasion of Egypt failed when it became a question of moving into the interior as opposed to establishing a coastal presence. In 1807, moreover, French advisers helped Ottoman forces to deploy cannon to prevent a British fleet seeking to force acceptance of British mediation of the Ottoman war with Russia. In those pre-steamship days, the British warships were also held back by contrary winds. As far as dominance was concerned, British caution in responding to China—for example, when the Gurkhas of Nepal unsuccessfully requested assistance in 1792—indicated a clear sense of relative power. Moreover, there was reluctance to accept commitments arising from the establishment, in 1786, of Georgetown, the first British base in Malaya. Yet, at the same time, there had been an important shift towards Western powers, and this is one of the most noteworthy developments of the period. Given modern concern about relations between the West and the Islamic world, it is instructive to consider the ability of Western states to project their power into this world. This can be seen in the treatment of what were regarded as rogue polities. For example, from their base in the Persian Gulf, the Wahhabi pirates attacked British East India Company ships and British warships in the Arabian Sea. A British punitive expedition of 1809, resulting in the sacking of Ras al-Khaimah, with massive destruction, freed British trade from attack, until a fresh pirate campaign began in 1816, leading to another British expedition in 1819–20.1 The latter, however, indicated the difficulty of establishing a permanent presence. In 1820, Captain Thomas Perronet Thompson, the commander of the Bombay Army’s garrison at Ras-al-Khaimah, was badly defeated by the Bani Bu Ali, desert Arabs whom he had accused of piracy. Thompson was reprimanded for rashness at the subsequent court martial, and the British presence was wound down when the base in Qeshm Island near the mouth of the Gulf was abandoned in 1823. More prominently, in 1816, the British took action against the Barbary States of North Africa, whose long-standing piracy was seen as an attack not only on British interests but also on the general freedom of navigation and trade with which the British associated themselves and from which other Western powers benefited when not at war with Britain. In 1816, Admiral Lord Exmouth, the Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, was ordered to deploy the fleet to Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis, in order to force them to release British subjects. The last two agreed, but Umar, the Dey of Algiers, refused. It was agreed to allow the Dey to send an embassy to London, but the continuation of Algerine piracy led the government to order the enforcement of its views, and Exmouth returned to Algiers with five ships of the line and sixteen other warships, as well as with the support of a Dutch frigate squadron. When no answer was returned to his demand for the end to Christian slavery in Algiers, he began a bombardment of nearly eight hours. In this, 40,000 round-shot and shells were fired, a testimony to the industrial underpinnings of British naval power; the Algerine ships were destroyed, the batteries were silenced; and much of the city was in ruins, although not without the cost of 818 British casualties. The Dey yielded, and over 1,600 slaves, mostly from Spain and the Italian principalities, were freed.2 This was seen, in both Britain and Europe, as a great triumph, and established a pattern of what was depicted as exemplary conduct. Unlike operations on land, some of which had to be remembered as glorious failures and few of which could be seen as of

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general value to humanity, it was possible to present the Pax Britannica at sea as invariably successful and praiseworthy. The previous year, British naval power had been demonstrated when a squadron of frigates entered the Bay of Naples and threatened to bombard the city unless it surrendered within forty-eight hours. Furthermore, at Algiers the British fleet had assumed a responsibility formerly undertaken by the Bourbon powers, and its achievement contrasted markedly with Spanish failure there in 1784. Combined with Russian successes in the early nineteenth century at the expense of Persia and Turkey, with Russian forces advancing as far as Adrianople in 1829, this represented a dramatic shift in the relative effectiveness of Islamic and non-Islamic powers, one that was to be greatly taken forward when the French captured Algiers in 1830. At the same time, it is important not to push a pattern too hard. Moreover, as a reminder of the extent to which the standard emphasis on conflict between Islamic and non-Islamic powers underrates warfare within Islam, such warfare was also important. In particular, the ambition of Mehmet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, was a cause of major instability at the same time as it demonstrated the diffuse nature of the authority of the Ottoman Sultan over his rather disparate empire. Mehmet Ali created a large army and used it for a series of expeditions as he sought to become the major power in the region. In 1813, Mecca and Medina were retaken from the Wahhabis, who had energized much of Arabia; an earlier Egyptian expedition launched in 1811 had been ambushed. A fresh rebellion, however, led to initial disaster for the Egyptians until, in 1814, the Wahhabi forces were defeated. In 1816, the Egyptians resumed the offensive into the deserts of Arabia, seizing the Wahhabi strongholds, culminating with the capture of their capital, Dar’iyya, in 1818, after a six-month siege. The resilience of the Wahhabis was shown by their continued opposition, and, in 1824, the second Sau’di-Wahhabi state was founded in the interior of Arabia, demonstrating that the regular forces of settled societies could only achieve so much. To the south of Egypt, the ports of Massawa and Suakin on the Red Sea were occupied by the Egyptians in 1818 and Nubia (northern Sudan) in 1820, while relatively well-equipped Egyptian forces operated from 1824 against Greeks revolting against Ottoman control. The Egyptian army was trained by French officers after 1815 and supplied by France until 1840. This raises the question of how far a narrative and analysis of Western power should be introduced, not so much in terms of the area conquered but rather with regard to the dominant military model.3 Such an adoption of the paradigm-diffusion approach to development, as generally applied, serves as a way to ensure that the non-West is worthy of consideration only insofar as it demonstrates the validity of this military model. There were, indeed, important indications of attempts to borrow Western practice, although there was no metallurgical capacity comparable to that of the industrial sectors of the leading Western powers and also nothing to compare with their fleets of heavily gunned specialist warships. It is, however, necessary to avoid apparently axiomatic definitions of effectiveness. Far more than the spread of a new weapons technology was in fact involved, but detailed work on expansionism by non-Western powers is frequently lacking, not least from the perspective of the knowledge of the individual scholar. At the very least, there is a situation of considerable unevenness, in part due to the problems posed by the extent and nature of the surviving evidence but also because of the focus of scholarly attention.

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More recent work, for example, has been devoted to Chinese expansion in the eighteenth century than to its Burmese counterpart. In looking at the non-Western material, it is clear that technology should no more be abstracted from political, cultural and social contexts than in the case of the West. These contexts help account for marked contrasts, both geographically and chronologically, in success and in the definition of success; and this was also relevant to the ability of Western powers to expand their empires. In particular, there is a difference between the conquest/battle stage of war and its pacification counterpart. The ability to prevent, limit or repress resistance is a crucial component of military history and one best understood in political terms. The task the military was entrusted with also emerges as important: for example, how necessary was pacification and what was it supposed to entail? In considering the response to the military, cultural factors were also significant. The differing organizational strength of particular governments can be seen as an aspect of Western success, with the continuity of Western agencies and forces, such as the East India Companies, contrasted with the more personalized military—political systems of Indian rulers. This argument, however, has to be handled with care in accounting for Western success, as the same point about the East India Companies can be made about China, while any contrast between Poland, with its very weak central government and high rate of civil conflict, and the Ottoman Empire does not match the standard suppositions about the superiority of the West. Nevertheless, accepting overlaps and parallels, there was a substantial difference between aspects of the West and the non-West. In particular, the organizational potency of expanding and affluent Western powers emerged in British success in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century: British financial credit, the expression of economic and fiscal strength and organization, played an important role in securing Indian cooperation (and Anglo-Indian military strength).4 This credit helped the British create the military hybrid or synthesis important to their tactical and operational success, not least with the development of a cavalry able to provide mobility and to counter the consequences of that of their opponents, and with marked improvements in logistical capability. Indian rulers tried for the same process of synthesis, but less successfully, due to financial, organizational and political factors. These were both specific to military structures and more general. The former included the extent to which Indian armies relied on recruitment via semi-independent figures akin to the landed nobility of medieval Europe, whereas the British East India Company relied on more direct recruitment and treated officers as a professional body subject to discipline. British commanders and officers obeyed orders to a degree very different to that of Indian counterparts who were ready to change allegiances or to try to seize independent power. A more general contrast was the greater ability of the Company to deploy funds and credit, thanks to its oceanic trading position. Non-military technology gave the Western powers a powerful comparative advantage in the world economy, which enabled them to change existing economic relationships in the nineteenth century. Specifically, this was a case of the economics of scale brought by the use of steamships. As a result, Western goods, particularly textiles and metals, became available in larger and cheaper quantities. This hit non-Western industries and led to a growth of primary production focused on Western markets. In Africa, this included palm oil, while there was a rise in the slave trade within the Continent, which

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was exploited for the last stages of the Atlantic slave trade and also for the Arab slave trade. Some of the military borrowing from Western powers was long-standing. This was true, for example, of the Ottomans, who had made earlier attempts in the eighteenth century, although it is important not to think of Ottoman developments simply in terms of such borrowing.5 At the close of that century, Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) attempted to introduce major changes in the army. He created the Nizam-i Cedid (new order army), organized and armed on European lines. The overthrow of Selim in 1807, however, when he tried to reform the janissary corps,6 traditionally the key force in the Ottoman army, the dissolving of the Nizam-i Cedid and the failure of Selim’s successor, Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) to re-establish control over the janissaries in 1808 (he only managed to do so in 1826), indicated the deeply rooted ideological, political and social obstacles to Ottoman military reform as well as the hostility to Western influences. From the perspective of the paradigm—diffusion model, this can then be linked to Ottoman failure at the hands of the Russians in 1806–12 and 1828–9 and at the hands of Mehmet Ali of Egypt in 1833 and 1840. At the same time, other factors were pertinent, not least the ability to devise strategies of survival. These are more pertinent than discussion of the eclipse of a great power. The Ottomans were eclipsed by 1792, in terms of economic power and military fiscalism, by the Western powers, but in spite of this, and extended wars and revolt, there had been a significant transformation from the federative forces of a patrimonial dynastic absolutism to the modern standing army of its European-style counterpart, and this led to a significant recovery by 1840 that was taken further by 1856.7 The downfall of the Ottoman ruling house in the early twentieth century has led to a reading back that underplays possibilities for Ottoman reform and military transformation.8 As a parallel, the tendency to view the fate of the Ottoman Empire as being determined by European governments unduly minimizes the role of Ottoman leaders and is also overly read back.9 Further east, as an instance of the increasing influence of Western models, in Persia, Crown Prince Abbas Mirza, who died in 1833, developed a European-officered, armed and trained new army in response to Russian victories in the wars of 1804–13 and 1826–8. Aman-Allah Khan, the Vali of Ardalan from c. 1800 to 1824, a powerful Kurdish leader, also tried to use European methods in the training of his troops, as did other provincial potentates. Success, however, was limited. Further east again, in the Punjab, the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh established Sikh dominance in 1799, and in 1803 began to create a corps of regular infantry and artillery on the Western model to complement the Sikh cavalry. In 1807, he set up factories in Lahore for the manufacture of guns. In Nepal, the Gurkhas used British deserters to teach them British drill and how to manufacture European-style muskets. They also learned how to cast cannon. In Vietnam, Nguyen Anh, who reigned as Gia-long from 1802–20, was interested in Western technology, employing it to help develop his fleet and also hiring French advisers to train his troops in European methods. Western influence was not dependent on government activity. Western traders also spread firearms, and thus their use, across much of the world—for example, around the Pacific. In Madagascar, Andrianampoinimerina, the ruler, from about 1783 to about 1810, of Ambohimanga in the centre of the island, used slaving to acquire guns and gunpowder from the coast where Europeans traded. He seized slaves from other

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Malagasy territories and exchanged them for these weapons. Having conquered part of the interior, he left his son Radama, who reigned from about 1810 to 1820, with the idea of extending the kingdom over the whole island. This proved a formidable task, not least because the army lacked adequate training, discipline and arms. Radama, however, transformed it with the help of three sergeants who had served in Western armies. Drill, discipline and firearms proficiency were introduced in a smaller, 15,000-strong force armed with modern European firearms. Like conflict in South-East Asia, this warfare is largely obscure, mainly because of a lack of sources but also due to insufficient attention. Non-Western powers in this period continue to attract limited study, which ensures that analysis of how successful states developed and operated draws on a limited list of cases, with all the problems that that entails. An account of the spread of Western influence, and of particular types of war-making by means of this influence, might suggest the accuracy of the paradigm—diffusion model and thus of a focus on the West. However, aside from the extent to which the borrowing was always selective, and there was no wholesale incorporation of Western methods, there were also powers and conflicts that did not conform to this pattern of Western influence, not least because firearms were not the key weapons in the fighting. The complexity of warfare in Africa certainly brings out this point and also indicates the continued marginal character of the Western great powers to developments in most of the world. For example, the successful forces in the jihad launched by Usuman dan Fodio and the Fulani against the Hausa states in modern northern Nigeria in 1804 initially had no gunpowder weaponry and were essentially mobile infantry forces, principally archers, able to use their firepower to defeat the cavalry of the established powers, as at the battle of Tabkin Kwotto in 1804. Their subsequent acquisition of cavalry (not firearms) was crucial in enabling them to develop tactics based on mobility, manoeuvre and shock attack. If these tactics were also those of Napoleon, the weaponry and context were different. By 1808, all the major Hausa states had fallen. In 1808, the Gobir capital of Alkalawa fell to a co-ordinated three-pronged pincer attack, indicating that firearms were not prerequisites for sophisticated offensive strategies. The jihad resulted in the creation of a new state, the Sokoto Caliphate, which was an important regional power. Similarly, in southern Africa, the emphasis was not on firearms. The key development there can be seen as the capture of Cape Town by the British from the Dutch in 1806, but, as far as the interior was concerned, Zulu expansion had more consequences. The Zulus, under Shaka, their chief from 1816 to 1828, proved both aggressive and expansionist, leading other peoples to migrate in the Mfecane (time of Troubles). The weaponry employed was very different to that in Europe. Shaka changed Zulu tactics, replacing light throwing assegais (javelins) by the i-klwa, a heavier, thrusting spear. Shaka forced defeated peoples to become Zulus: their clans were absorbed.

The character of American power By the time Napoleon fell in 1815, the USA was well established. Its role was marginal to power relationships elsewhere, and it may seem anachronistic to devote so much space to the USA, but it provides an opportunity to underline the factors that could be involved in the understanding of the appropriate use of power, while the later key significance of

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the USA ensures that its origins deserve attention. America was a state born in war, and its early decades as an independent country involved the assertion of power through force, against both foreign and domestic challenges. Indeed, exigencies and debates focused on force and how best to secure, sustain and use it were crucial in the political and governmental history of these decades. This subject is generally neglected these days because of a preference, in accounts of the American Revolution and subsequent years, for social themes, especially topical ones of gender and race. Furthermore, among political historians, there has traditionally been a degree of reluctance in coming to terms with the formative context of international competition and military need for the USA. America was not alone in having to define itself as a new state in an acutely threatening international order, for this was also true of a host of states and would-be states across the Western world, while all existing states, in responding to challenges, did likewise, albeit within far more established political patterns. The usual comparison for the American Revolution is with the French Revolution that began in 1789, but that, in fact, was only one among a number of European revolutionary or radical movements, and, in several countries in the 1780s, short-lived radical governments were established. These included Geneva, the United Provinces (modern Netherlands), and the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium), in all of which the new order was suppressed by counterrevolutionary force. The Russian destruction of Polish independence in 1793–5 can also be located in this context, as the reform movement that had drawn up a new constitution in 1791 was a particular issue for Catherine the Great of Russia. Thus, an attempt at the ideological control of neighbours could be an aspect of great-power activity. Furthermore, as another comparative element, the range of territories affected by secessionist movements in the European colonial world included not only the Thirteen Colonies but also Ireland (unsuccessfully against British rule in 1798) and Haiti (successfully against France from 1791). Across the Western world, a sense of incipience accompanied by urgency was general, and the issues were similar. In particular, as with all revolutionary periods, irrespective of the goals of policy, there was the question of how best to control military forces. This involved both the specific issue of loyalty, with the political consequences that might arise, and the more general one of long-term political and social impact. The issue of loyalty was most acute if the new political system was felt to be under threat. That led, for example, to the killing of French Revolutionary generals for being unsuccessful, because a lack of success was held to betoken an absence of zeal, if not worse. Alongside ensuring effectiveness in conflict, a failure to control the military was a serious problem for new governments and states. Napoleon’s coup in 1799 revealed this in France, while successive caudillos were to make it apparent in Spanish America, and the civil sphere in Haiti suffered greatly from the same problem. The USA was far from removed from this process as the Newburgh Conspiracy at the close of the War of American Independence showed. Moreover, Brigadier-General James Wilkinson, Governor of the Louisiana Territory, was heavily involved with the plans associated with Vice-President Aaron Burr in 1804–6, which included the secession of New York and New England (1804),10 and with, subsequently, the ‘Spanish Conspiracy’, which appears to have included plans for a Western secession. Wilkinson hoped to seize Santa Fé from the Spaniards for his own ends.11

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As a reminder of the key role of political cultures in framing assumptions, alongside the fear of military force subverting the republic, of a Benedict Arnold, Oliver Cromwell or Napoleon Bonaparte, or their equivalent, indeed, in religious terms, of an ungodly ‘Man of Blood’ acting as an un-Christian tyrant, there was also a profound anxiety about the problems for American public life that would come from the military, irrespective of the intentions of its commanders. In part, this stemmed from the origins of the American state (the federal entity as well as the individual states), both as a product of British political culture and as a reaction against the supposed authoritarian practices of the British metropole, not least in its use of military force, in its expectations of financial support for the military and in its readiness to rely on military governance. The political culture was that of opposition to a standing army. This was the result of a seventeenth-century English tradition, directed against Stuart and Cromwellian autocracy, that had been revived in the ‘Common-wealth’ and country—party critique of supposed ‘Old Corps’ Whig governmental practices and intentions during the reigns of George I (1714–27) and George II (1727–60). From the imperial perspective, this might appear surprising, as British regulars had played a key role in the conquest of French Canada in 1758–60, thus ending the challenge to British North America’s most vulnerable borders. However, the British military had won few plaudits from the colonists, being widely seen, particularly by self-conscious local politicians, as autocratic in intention and manner. Under George III, American hostility to the British military had risen when it had been associated, first as cause and, subsequently, as support, for an unpopular process of taxation; and this was to be accentuated by the experience of war and occupation. This was not the best background for any attempt to create a standing force to fight for American independence and, subsequently, to advance national interests. This problem was exacerbated by the extent to which assumptions and practices about military goals and activity were colony-based and militia-orientated.12 The USA, therefore, represented an accentuation of the commonplace reluctance to see regular forces as anything other than supporters of centralization and arbitrary government. Yet, more than a militia would be required to fight the British regulars, let alone subsequently to act as a great power. This was urgent from the outset, both because the British had a substantial force in Boston at the beginning of the War of Independence and as a result of the great vulnerability of America: its lack of a battle fleet. Whatever the strength of individual American warships, as seen in 1812 when three British frigates were captured, and whatever the potential of American privateers, the Americans lacked a fleet able to block the use of the Atlantic by the British, both as a means of communication, partly solving British logistical issues in the New World, and as the basis for a strategic dimension. In the nineteenth century, this lack was to lead to a heavy emphasis in the USA on coastal fortifications in doctrine, force structure and expenditure, a policy clearly directed against Britain, the leading naval power. On 14 June 1775, Congress decided to raise the Continental Army and, the following day, appointed George Washington commander. He was unwilling to see militiamen as a substitute for Continentals, but the powerful American ideological—political preference for militia over a trained army continued throughout the war, and, indeed, the citizen soldier is an ideal that remains significant for Americans. The formation of the Continental Army was a political act that demonstrated the type of power that was being

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created. The army, a force that would not dissolve at the end of the year, even if individual terms of service came to an end, symbolized the united nature of the struggle by the Thirteen Colonies and was a vital move in the effort to win foreign recognition and support, although this also explained Washington’s reluctance after 1778 to expose his inexperienced force in open battle if he could possibly avoid it. It was not, indeed, itself necessary to have such an army in order for individual colonies/states to assist each other militarily, as they did before and during the Revolution. However, by having such an army, military decisions were in large part taken out of the ambit of state government. Furthermore, individual military careers indicated the growing role of national considerations and helped to make the new country a functioning reality capable of eliciting loyalty, a key goal for any new power. The success of the Revolution did not end disputes over how best to organize the military; indeed, it encouraged them, as there was room for political debate without the exigencies of war lessening the range of options, while the degree of federal responsibility proved a particular issue of controversy. With both the military and with foreign policy, the Americans avoided the fissiparous consequences of a federal system by giving the key power to federal, not state, government. Individual states lacked the right to negotiate ‘foreign’ treaties or to make war; although their relations with Native Americans initially threatened to permit both. The nature and size of the national army was particularly controversial. Henry Knox, a keen Federalist, pressed hard for a stronger federal government and a national military establishment while heading the War Department in 1785–94. He, however, faced opposition to a permanent force, as well as the financial weakness of the federal government. On 3 June 1784, the day after decreeing that the last units of the Continental Army be disbanded, the Confederation Congress voted to establish a 700-strong regiment of one-year volunteers in order to strengthen America’s presence in the Ohio Valley. The absence, however, until the constitution was settled and established, of a well-organized government or a system of direct taxation was a fundamental limit to military capability. By the end of 1786, the regiment consisted of only 565 officers and men. The army was subsequently expanded as relations slipped into an initially unsuccessful war with Native Americans, but, after peace was negotiated, the army was cut to 3,359 men in 1796. The army was then expanded by the Federalists in 1798, during the Quasi War with France, with Alexander Hamilton as senior ranking major general.13 He sought to develop the force as a powerful permanent body able to unite America against internal subversion and foreign threat, but his intentions were suspect to many. The difference over force structure was politically very divisive. Opposed to France in the late 1790s, the governing Federalists linked foreign and domestic policies closely to military preparedness and built up both army and navy. The government also passed the divisive Alien and Sedition Acts in order to strengthen the country against internal opposition. As an instance of a more common issue with the politics of strategic culture, contrasting views in part rested on very different conceptions of the international system. Whereas Hamilton advanced a pessimistic interpretation of competing states and the need for preparedness, critics felt that a benign system was possible. Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans, who gained power after the election of 1800, limited the peacetime establishment of the army to 3,284. Although Jefferson created West Point, he and the Republicans were not interested in a European-style military nor an army of imperial

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size, were opposed to the taxes they entailed and were suspicious of the existing army, not least because most of the senior officers were Federalists.14 Instead, Jefferson preferred to rely on national unity, an example of the comforting illusion that virtue would necessarily prevail and that power rested on moral factors. This led Jefferson, in his Inaugural Address in 1801, to claim that America was the strongest country in the world. Keeping a large military establishment at a distance, however, was related to practices that were not conducive to professionalism and, therefore, effectiveness. In the early Republican period, the practice of commissioning men directly from civil life, rather than promoting from the ranks in peacetime, led to a stress on political affiliation, social connections and appropriate conduct. All of these brought the military close to civil society but with deleterious consequences for military effectiveness, as was seen in the War of 1812 with Britain. However, the general political atmosphere was not one that identified professionalism with effectiveness. Similarly, the Federalist plan to build up the navy was stopped when the Jeffersonians took power. Jefferson favoured coastal gunboats rather than the more expensive frigates with their oceanic range,15 although he did send a squadron to North Africa to combat the Barbary pirates. The emphasis on gunboats conformed to the militia tradition of American republicanism. Militia could use gunboats to defend the fortifications being built. However, the overall emphasis on the defensive was not the best preparation for an effective operational army, nor, specifically, for an invasion of Canada, which was still under British rule. Far from such political distinctions being an aspect of American exceptionalism, they were reflected in serious divisions over foreign policy and the military in other states with a public politics, such as the United Provinces (Netherlands) in the 1780s and France in the early 1790s. The American army was built up in 1808 as relations deteriorated with Britain, but, in 1812, the army establishment was only 6,686 officers and men, while the Navy had seven frigates, ten sloops and sixty-two gunboats, but no ships of the line. This was not the sort of force that could mount transoceanic amphibious operations, and, indeed, this crucial lack of capability helped ensure that American power was restricted to ‘near America’. Sending three frigates and a schooner to the Mediterranean in 1801 was scarcely sufficient for any major scheme. Similarly, the overland force under William Eaton that marched from Alexandria in Egypt to help capture Derna contained only ten American marines, alongside thirty-eight Greeks and about 300 Arabs. This scarcely compared with the overseas forces that Britain deployed: in 1793, 33,000 were sent to the West Indies, and in 1807, 6,000 troops were sent to capture Alexandria, while 4,800 troops stormed Montevideo that year, a force reinforced to 8,000 before the unsuccessful British attack on Buenos Aires. In 1809, 10,000 British troops captured Martinique from the French. Aside from the small size of the American military, American military capacity suffered from the lack of any equivalent to the ancillary forces that greatly enhanced British capability. This was particularly seen around the Indian Ocean. The mostly native British East India Company army was 18,200 strong in 1763, 115,400 in 1782 and 154,000 in 1805. Indian troops also played a major role in operations outside India: in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the East Indies, Egypt and Mauritius. The Mauritius expedition in 1810 included 3,000 Indian troops; there were 5,770 Indian as well as 5,344 British troops in the expedition that took Batavia (modern Djkarka), the leading Dutch position

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in the East Indies, in 1811, and 1,800 Indian troops, as well as 900 British, in the force that conquered the inland Sri Lankan kingdom of Kandy in 1815. The Americans had no equivalent. There was a use of Native American allies—Andrew Jackson benefiting from the support of about 500 Cherokee and Greek when he stormed the Creek camp at Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. However, numbers were small, and this did not represent an appreciable offensive capability, other than against nearby areas. Unlike Britain in India, the Americans did not rely heavily on indigenous alliances. Slave troops had been used with some success in the West Indies by both Britain and France in the 1790s, and the success of the Haitian Revolution in what had been the leading French slave economy—St Domingue—underlined the military proficiency of slaves and their ecological suitability for campaigning in the West Indies. Yet, this very Revolution underlined the American revulsion against arming slaves that had also been seen in the reaction to the adoption of such a policy in 1775–6 by John, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia. Thus, the Americans were not to create a slave army to campaign in the West Indies, a key instance of strategic culture and power possibilities being moulded by domestic ideology. Aside from ideological opposition, there was not the institutional basis for such a policy anyway. Slavery in North American was private, not public; it was an aspect of investment, not of governmental utility. The War of 1812–15 reflected the popularity of expansionism in some American political circles. For the Americans, however, this was a very divisive struggle, and one in which many refused to help, a reminder of the contentious nature of power. The Federalists, who were heavily represented in New England, were opposed to war with Britain, which they correctly saw as likely to harm trade. The Federalists also saw territorial expansion as likely to benefit the rival Republicans. In addition, New England interests had only limited concern in the British relations with Native Americans that troubled frontier regions. The divisions on declaring war—seventy-nine to forty-nine in the House of Representatives, and nineteen to thirteen in the Senate—reflected the depth of disquiet. It was difficult to create both a nation-state and a nationality that worked. As the constitution expressly conferred the power to declare war on Congress, and Congress alone could vote money to pay for the war and the military, the potentially unifying position of the presidency was heavily qualified. Nevertheless, in 1812, division did not lead to civil conflict, and it is still appropriate to refer to American goals, albeit accepting that the depth of division not only limited the availability of resources but also affected strategic options. Federalist opposition to the war led to a convention at Hartford in December 1814-January 1815 that proposed changes to the constitution but was coloured in the public eye by extremist talk of secession by New England.16 This compromised the Federalists, helping James Monroe to win the 1816 and 1820 presidential elections, a reminder of the interaction of perception with politics. These victories ensured not only a continuity in Jeffersonian Democratic–Republican government but also in control by the group that had waged the recent war. Although the Democratic-Republicans adopted a number of Federalist views and programmes once in power—the Bank, a standing army and, after 1812, a oceanic navy and a general staff (created in 1813), their inclinations, attitudes and ambitions were very different to those of Hamilton. The success of Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans in 1815, as opposed to the earlier shortcomings of the regulars on the Canadian frontier, indicated to Americans

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that professionalism was not necessarily a virtue. However, the War of 1812 was too brief and limited to lead to the sweeping political and governmental changes that the protracted character of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars led to in Europe. Despite a measure of American integration through economic growth and better communications (although far less than was to follow the War of 1812), the state/regional forces of loyalties and identities had been shown to be a challenge for American political coherence and military effectiveness, and nothing was done to alter the situation. The Federalists offered an agenda for governmental change designed to deal with the protracted crisis that arose from American vulnerability and international tension, but the crisis never became sufficiently severe to lead to a major reconfiguration of government. The War of 1812 had left a conviction that America required a stronger military and the core of the wartime staff system was retained, with a new reform leadership instigating new procedures for efficiency and accountability and a de-facto acceptance of the regular army as the true first line of land defence. On 3 March 1815, Congress voted for a new peacetime establishment of 12,383 troops (as opposed to the 3,284 in 1807), and in 1816 voted 1 million per annum for eight years to construct a navy, including nine 74-gun ships of the line. However, this did not extend to a sweeping reform, either in terms of the organization of large-scale power projection or with regard to the militia. This left America in a weak position in the event of any future major war. By 1815, war had helped define the American state both externally and internally. The key internal episodes were Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786–7 and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794, both of which were rapidly overcome. Compared to the serious and persistent civil violence throughout Latin America that followed independence, both separatist and struggles for political control within individual states, the situation in the USA was relatively peaceful. Indeed, any reading of the history of Colombia or Mexico, Argentina or Brazil serves as a salutary comparison to the political history of the USA. These states also had serious sectional divisions as well as differences over ideology and, furthermore, serious problems over how to control generals and other military leaders.17 Presidents were not apt to give up power. The failure of Shays’ and the Whiskey rebellions ensured that there was no pressure for a strong federal force capable of enforcing government power, nor a ‘balkanization’ akin to that which affected Mexico, where local militias and strongmen enjoyed great power in the 1820s. Political differences were institutionalized in a federal system of shared sovereignty which made it easier to express interests and manage disputes short of conflict in the USA. Externally, the key definition of the USA was the winning of independence but in circumstances that did not lead to the creation of a significant military able to give effect to bold expansionist plans. The different impact of revolution in the USA and France reflected geopolitics more than resources, but the pressures of the moment were also central in giving shape to the contrasting political culture of the two revolutions. The war, indeed, that secured and defined American liberty and empire was the long-standing one in which America’s role was usually marginal: that between Britain and France. It was this conflict that ensured that the French were unable to maintain their positions in North America, losing Canada in 1760 and feeling it necessary to sell vulnerable Louisiana in 1803, just as it was the resumption of war between Britain and France in 1803 that doomed the French attempt to reconquer St Domingue/Haiti. War between Britain and

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France also meant that the former could devote only part of its attention to conflict with the USA in 1778–83 and, even more, 1812–15. Indeed, as a pointed reminder of the need to look at more than bilateral relations, the British had only been able to make a major effort to regain North America (including Canada) in 1776–7 because they were not then at war with France. This was amply recognized at the time and helped make French entry a crucial goal for the Americans. French entry ensured that the conflict became a world war. In military, strategic and political terms, it provided force, range and options that the Americans on their own could not deploy. Politically, this included a representation in international power politics that rebels could not obtain on their own. Crucially, French entry also cleared the hurdle to that of Spain, for the Spanish government had been worried about supporting rebels. Spanish entry in 1779 made a major difference to the arithmetic of naval strength. American naval strength was not strategically important. It could not threaten the British Isles; indeed, the contrast with the situation in 1945, when the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands was a prospect within a year, is striking. In 1779, however, America’s allies, France and Spain, made an attempt to invade southern England. Unsuccessful, it reiterated the lesson of 1759 that Britain had to balance transoceanic activity with countering the threat to the home base. Once the alliance that had fought Britain collapsed as the British successfully negotiated peace separately in 1782–3, America was in a vulnerable position. In the event of conflict with Britain, the latter could threaten naval action, ranging from blockade to invasion. The role of naval power ensured that America was not protected from the power politics of the Western world by distance or the moat of the Atlantic: it was easier for Britain, France or Spain to intervene in the New World than in Eastern Europe, as Mexico discovered in the 1860s. The role of international power politics in American history, however, was such that, once the War of American Independence was over, there was no possibility of any revanche, not only because of British political attitudes but also because Britain had to consider the possibility of revived confrontation with the French. Indeed, the two came close to war in 1787 in the Dutch Crisis and, again, in 1790, when France promised support to Spain when the latter came close to war with Britain in Nootka Sound Crisis. As a sign of improved Anglo-American relations in the shadow of Anglo-Bourbon confrontation, the latter crisis opened up the possibility of Anglo-American cooperation against Spain. At war with France from 1793, the British government was ready to improve relations with the USA, negotiating Jay’s Treaty, which settled, or at least eased, commercial and territorial disputes. Similarly, although too little and too late, the British government sought to avoid war with the USA in 1812. The Anglo-French context repeatedly encompassed Spain. As an ally of Britain in the latter stages of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain benefited from a measure of British support, and this restrained the USA. Conversely, the situation changed after the end of the wars, and the British provided no protection for the Spanish position in Florida as American annexationist pressures grew. The wars that defined America were not yet those in which the country played a central role. The assumption of American exceptionalism thus clashes with a need to consider America as a participant, willing and unwilling, in a complex and multipolar international system. Independence for the New World did not mean the end of European influence. Indeed, much of the Americas can be seen as part of a British informal empire

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that owed a lot to investment and trade. Even the USA, in its proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, was effectively relying on the benign goals of British naval dominance of the Atlantic, although, earlier, the end of British protection opened the Americans to the piracy of the Barbary states. Furthermore, it was not until the 1860s that the European powers really settled the American question by ceding dominance to the USA. The defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (1861–5) settled the shape of the country and ensured that the industrial strength of the North would not be challenged by another set of values. The failure of the French in Mexico, a failure that was largely due to local opposition, was underlined by American pressure, and this also acted as a restraint on a revival of Spanish activism. The sale of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands in 1867 ended the Russian presence in North America, while British support for Canadian Confederation in 1867 and the withdrawal of the majority of British garrisons in 1871 was a reflection of American strength.

China If the USA was becoming the great power in North America, China, its counterpart in East Asia, was in a very different situation. From the late seventeenth century until the third quarter of the eighteenth, China could lay claim to being the most successful military power on land; and if this was not the case over the following half-century, this was essentially because China was a satisfied power. By the end of the eighteenth century, China, which had the largest army in the world, was at peace with all its neighbours, and on China’s terms, a situation that did not describe any of the European powers. Russia accepted China’s treaty boundaries but not those of the Ottoman Empire or Persia; the eastern Mongols were part of the Chinese system; the Zunghars had been destroyed, and other neighbours were tributary powers. The next powerful Central Asian people to the west, the Kazakhs, accepted tributary status and remained under Chinese influence until it was supplanted by that of Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. If the Chinese were less successful against Burma (1765–9) and against Tongking in northern Vietnam (1788–9) than against the Zunghars, this, in part, is a reminder that all empires faced limits to their power, as the British discovered in 1806–7 in Argentina, Egypt and Turkey. Failure, however, did not have to mean collapse, as it did for Napoleon as a consequence of his defeat in Russia in 1812. This was, in part, a logistical disaster that contrasts with the Chinese success in operating in Central Asia. That the Chinese were less successful along their southern frontiers than they were in Central Asia was in part because the heavily forested environment was very difficult for large-scale military operations and unsuitable for Manchu cavalry and also because the area was not of crucial strategic interest to China: often the generals sent were less competent. There was no Chinese tradition of sustained attempts at conquest in South-East Asia. Thus, strategic culture interacted with the geopolitics of Chinese great-power status. In addition, the Chinese were affected by the improvement of Burmese military organization and achievement in the mid-eighteenth century by Alaungpaya. This was part of his regeneration of a divided country and indicates that the causes of military revival and new-found success rested primarily not, as is often assumed, on the adoption or

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adaptation of Western technology and/or organization but rather on indigenous causes. Successful leadership was crucial as was also demonstrated by the revival of Thai fortunes in the 1770s under Tashin. As with Napoleon, however, he was in the end unsuccessful, launching an unpopular invasion of Vietnam. A focus on leadership might seem to subvert any general theory of military and political development, but it also serves to underline the crucial role of political contexts, not least because skill in handling them helped determine the range of domestic and foreign opponents. The importance of domestic opponents in this period in challenging major states is underlined by considering the history of China. As with Spanish opposition to Napoleon, the huge millenarian White Lotus rebellion of 1796–1805 in the province of Shaanxi was made more troublesome by the rebels’ extensive use of guerrilla tactics and by the extent to which they benefited from the hilly character of their core area. The Chinese government had to mount a formidable and costly military effort and also employed brutally repressive methods. Similar brutality was used in response to revolts by non-Chinese subjects, especially the Miao revolts in the provinces of Hunan and Guizhou in the period 1795 to 1805. These revolts were a counterpart to the opposition of the Native Americans to American expansion in that they were in opposition to the spread of Han settlement and the attempt to increase government power. The Chinese army responded by creating more garrisons, introducing military— agricultural colonists and building a wall. There were also serious rebellions in the Ottoman empire. These were wide ranging, including that by Kara Mahmoud, the Governor of Scutari in the 1780s and 1790s and also in Egypt in the 1780s. Furthermore, it proved difficult for the Ottomans to maintain authority over the nomadic tribesmen of the Arab borderlands. In the early nineteenth century, there were also revolts against Ottoman rule in Greece and Serbia. Rebellions, however, were neither cause nor proof of a loss of great-power status.

The West and East Asia European powers in the nineteenth century were far more significant politically in the Old World, particularly along the Asian littoral, than in the New World where their territorial power largely collapsed. Their activity included, in the 1830s, not only British pressure on China in the First Opium War of 1839–42 but also against Egyptian expansionism towards Syria, action which led to the British annexation of Aden in 1839. The growing weakness of the Asian states in the period 1775–1860 requires discussion, although this political weakness was accompanied by a range of characteristics, most obviously commercial opportunities, that encouraged Western activity. The Chinese population may have risen from 150 million in 1650 to 300 million in 1800, both figures greater than the population of European Christendom. However, already, prior to the European pressure from the 1830s, there were signs of difficulties in Chinese government. Alongside such impressive feats as the supply of the large forces that conquered Xinjiang in the 1750s, there were serious problems, including widespread corruption, losses of tax revenue and a deleterious role for tax farmers. As a result, from the 1720s, provincial officials were permitted to retain a percentage of taxes in order to support local administration. By providing reasonable salaries, this cut corruption.

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China was to be defeated by Britain in the Opium Wars, and it is significant that this was the Western power that was victorious in what was a key instance of the process by which ‘the capacity of Western societies to impose convergence shot ahead of Asians’ and Africans’ capacities to maintain a more equal society’.18 Britain benefited considerably from economic and fiscal development, specifically commercial strength, economic capability and financial viability, and from a geopolitical position that enabled it to limit its role in European power politics. The comparison of British and Chinese development leaves it unclear whether a particular type of state structure was necessary to the large-scale coal mining that Britain, unlike China, pursued19 or, more generally, to the modernization of Britain, which is seen as crucial in the West’s ability to become central to global economic links and, thus, to the process and profits of globalization. The growth of world trade in the nineteenth century made this Western capability particularly valuable and, in comparison, placed non-Western powers at a greater disadvantage. In the case of China, it is, in addition, necessary to give due weight to serious political problems20 within the state, such as the insufficient control of the central authorities over the provincial viceroys, problems which also had economic consequences. The crisis of the Taiping rebellion can indeed be seen as more significant than the Western pressure on China and, particularly, the First Opium War. The Taiping, in 1851, launched a quasimessianic search for Chinese revival as a reaction against Manchu rule. Unlike the American Civil War, this was not a separatist struggle but, instead, a wide-ranging, bitter, sustained and deeply damaging conflict that lasted until 1866. In Japan, there was no conflict with the West to offer comparison to the domestic struggles within Japan that were to accompany modernization later in the century. However, the opening up of Japan to Western influence contrasted markedly with the situation in the early seventeenth century when there had been a violent and successful rejection of such influence. In July 1853, a squadron of four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry entered Tokyo Bay in order to persuade Japan to inaugurate relations. After presenting a letter from President Fillmore, Perry sailed to China declaring that he would return the following year. Having wintered on the Chinese coast, itself an important display of Western naval capability, and made naval demonstrations in the Ryuku and Bonin Islands, which secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa, Perry returned to Japan with a larger squadron and negotiated the Treaty of Kanagawa. This provided for American diplomatic representation, the right for American ships to call at two ports and humane treatment for ship-wrecked American soldiers. Alongside the landing of forces in Shanghai in 1854, 1855 and 1859, and in Canton in 1856, to protect American interests, this represented an important projection of power by the USA. It also indicated the extent to which international relations did not reflect exact equations of strength but, instead, registered shifting advantages that were easier to sense than to measure. The Taiping rising, the later Self-Strengthening Movement in China and the modernization that was to follow the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868 all had indigenous roots, but they were also reactions to the interacting pressure of Western demands and example. As such, there was a parallel with the state formation in Korea, Japan and Vietnam that in part was a response to Chinese power and cultural example during the period 221 BC–AD 907.21

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The 1850s, moreover, was an important decade because it saw Britain overcome the most serious challenge to its imperial position between the Napoleonic and First World Wars. The Indian Mutiny (1857–9), which in India is widely referred to as the Rebellion, was a serious challenge in what was militarily the most important British colony rather than a defeat on the frontiers of empire as the British encountered in Afghanistan in 1842 and were to encounter at the hands of the South African Boers in 1881 and 1899. At the same time, much of India did not support the Mutiny, and loyal Indian forces helped in its suppression. This serves as a reminder of the capacity of Empire to integrate interests and, at the same time, of its dependence on cooperation as well as consent. Both rested on practices and senses of interest that were ideological and political as much as material. This was true of support for Empire in the metropole as well as on the periphery in what was an increasingly interconnected world.22 Thus, the material strength of the imperial power, while significant, was not the determining factor in imperial cohesion. The public format of empire was also an issue. Empire in the shape of monarchy posed problems where legitimacy was not readily established, most obviously in Napoleonic Europe and also in Mexico, but was acceptable where there were grounded patterns of monarchical rule within a given political format, most obviously China. Empire in the form of representative control, or at least of a degree of such control, might seem more successful, not least because it was not dependent on the vagaries of the individual ability of the ruler. However, this control could not guarantee cohesion, not least when its symbolism was qualified by separatism, as in thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies in 1775 and in the American South in 1861. These separatist struggles indicate the importance of ideological factors alongside material self-interest. Each was significant in leading to the outbreak of civil war, but the ideological factors were more important as those of material self-interest could be folded up into them. The importance of ideology also emerges from the British role in the abolition of the slave trade, a role that stemmed from the growing importance of a reforming, liberal, middle-class culture that regarded the trade and slavery as abhorrent, anachronistic and associated with everything it deplored. Britain expended much diplomatic capital on moves against the trade so that the granting of recognition to the newly independent states in Latin America, including Texas, depended on their abolishing the trade. Pressure was also exerted on other states, including France and the USA, to implement their bans, and there was sustained pressure on Brazil, the leading slave economy and the prime destination of the slave trade. The sense of moral purpose behind British policy rested on the state’s unchallenged naval power, and this policy was given a powerful naval dimension by anti-slavery patrols. Furthermore, abolitionists pressed for the retention of bases in West Africa that could help in action against the trade. The abolition of the slave trade was a key achievement of the world’s leading naval power. This was an ideological struggle as well, with the slave trade and slavery associated with barbarism and presented as incompatible with civil liberty. Far from being based on economic calculation, this was an ethical foreign policy that was economically counterproductive. Opposition to the slave trade became a leading aspect of a liberal tradition that was identified with Britain and validated by its success in the nineteenth century. The cause joined free trade, utilitarian policies, responsible government, the rule of law and individual liberty. Inconsistencies can be seen in aspects of British policy, with abolitionists complaining about British investment in Brazil and

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Cuba, economies that continued to use slaves, but the overriding impression is at variance with the concept of power simply seeking more power. The role of idealist conceptions, whether attractive or unsympathetic, indeed emerges clearly in the analysis of many states. This helped ensure that alliances were as much about ideas as about interests. Furthermore, spreading Western values was seen as a way to entrench them and thus to anchor the West. As such, a strategy of values was at issue.

6 Accelerated change, 1860–1913 The projection of Western power into the interior of continents and the consequent remoulding of geopolitics, and of power status, are the prime topic of this chapter. At present, there is a tendency to discuss this projection in terms of pressures from the imperial periphery, as well as drive from the metropole. In part, the projection of Western power also led to the reshaping of the Western world; although, while some of the conflicts within the West can be related to the pressures arising from the expansion of Western control—for example, the Crimean and American Civil Wars—this was not the case for other wars such as those of German and Italian unification. Moreover, if imperialism in this period was largely Western, there were also non-Western imperialisms: in Egypt, Japan and Ethiopia, and also attempts at revival in other societies, such as the Self-Strengthening Movement in China and the Young Turks Movement. In this period, as also with today, there was no equivalence between the organizational structures and ethos of countries that experienced Western strength, such as Somaliland (now Somalia) and those of leading Western powers, such as the USA. However, the military and political consequences of Western power were very different in the heyday of Western power in 1890–1910 to the situation after 1945. The heyday was a high point of the period from the 1740s to 1940s, and, more precisely, the 1850s to 1940s, in which Western states had a meaningful and usable superiority on land increasingly, and certainly by the 1880s, against nearly all comers, a superiority which underwrote the process of conquest in the Old World. Here again, however, there is the danger of conflating the variety of circumstances that comprise the non-West. Indeed, factors that helped provide a Western capability advantage or caused success (the two are not synonymous) in one context were not necessarily relevant in others. This makes overall processes, and, therefore, judgements, of causality more difficult. Organizational factors in Western capability and success contribute to the argument that, by the late nineteenth century, Western armies had a crushing superiority over nonWestern ones, not only because, for centuries, their states regularly fought major wars against each other, but also due to the consequences. In part, only the strongest survived, in a constant competition to improve armies that can be discussed in terms of a militarized Darwinism, but, in part, this end also defined state finances, administration and politics. Compromises between monarchs and nobles produced states which maintained the largest and best armies they could afford, controlled by an able, but loyal, officer corps. It could be argued that, as a result, Western states became the most militarized and militarily effective on Earth. There were clearly, in addition, very martial non-Western societies, but, at the level of major states, non-Western powers had to undergo a revolution if they wished to match the foundations of Western strength. However, Ethiopia under Menelik II (r. 1889–1913) was an example of a non-Western society that succeeded despite not undergoing a revolution.

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In the West, countries could maintain large armies without threatening their existence and become stronger simply by raising more revenues and regiments. Western society also displayed a capacity for rapid response to new military demands. This was particularly seen with the American Civil War (1861–5), in which the absence of any tradition of a large standing army did not prevent the creation of two substantial armies, as well as the second largest navy in the world. In large part, such responsiveness drew on the resources of society, including patterns of associational behaviour, high rates of literacy and the ability to comprehend, tap and organize productive resources, not least the capital investment required for the large-scale manufacture of weapons. This was important to the Union’s ability to overcome problems of military inexperience, logistics and the size of campaigning area, to take war to the Confederacy and to force it to surrender.1 There were multiple failures in the Union’s military trajectory, not least in response to the possibilities and problems created by the changing nature of war,2 but the overall impression is of a positive transformation. In the non-West, however, due to economic, organizational and political constraints and limitations, raising taxes created crises, and strengthening armies therefore threatened to weaken the state. To a considerable extent, moreover, old armies were ossified, and often they had to be destroyed before new ones could begin. As a result, Asian states Westernized their armies only when they made that aim fundamental and could survive the crises it caused. The Westernization of armies strained their financial and administrative systems and provoked political crises, especially over the key issue of military and political command. Westernization required a large and able officer corps wielding control of the armed forces, but such corps could overthrow their masters, as in the Ottoman Empire and Persia (Iran). In Japan, in contrast, Westernization followed a political revolution, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and officers were selected for loyalty to a regime. In Egypt, the creation of a powerful army earlier in the nineteenth century was undermined by an organizational practice of proprietary command by high-ranking officers which made it difficult to foster innovation. Combined with the intractability of operating in Ethiopia in the 1870s, this led to a crisis that the British were able to exploit to win control in 1882.3 It is also possible, however, that the model equating Westernization with progress can be qualified, not least because it underrates the extent to which some states were able to enhance governmental and military performance without having to borrow Western models.4 Moreover, in searching for key factors, it may be pertinent to focus not on an inherent superiority of Western forces but on their ability to draw on the key backing of local auxiliaries and also on the support of the international systems of which they were part when pursuing regional power politics, whether against other Western or nonWestern forces. Thus, for example, the capacity of the East India Companies to profit from wide-ranging trades, to anticipate these profits through loans and to move funds from metropoles may well have been crucial to conflict in India and elsewhere.5 Conversely, it is also appropriate not to see developments solely in terms of a narrative driven by the West. Just as, in the eighteenth century, the Safavids were overthrown by the Afghans, not the Russians (see p. 72), and the Mughals and Marathas gravely weakened by Persian and Afghan invasions of India, so, in the nineteenth, the Taiping rebellion can be seen as the key challenge to late Imperial China: it was a revolutionary movement which took China into a fourteen-year civil war. Western empires can also be

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seen not as distinctive imperial systems but as sharing in a more general process of winning local support for imperial power (see p. 114). The three key issues for this period, nevertheless, are the expansion of the West, changes within the West and the fate of the non-West. Technology, economics and the cultural contexts that framed responses to the opportunities offered were crucial to this expansion. That is particularly true of Britain, where the culture proved especially receptive to the possibilities of change.6 In terms of the age, the speed and articulation offered British power by technological developments (especially, from mid-century, the steamship and the telegraph), by knowledge systems (particularly the accurate charting and mapping of coastal waters)7 and by organizational methods (notably the coaling stations on which the Royal Navy came to rely), all provided a hitherto-unsurpassed global range and reach.8 As a result, it became possible, indeed increasingly feasible, to theorize the construction of a global polity,9 as well as to provide intimidation in the shape of gunboat diplomacy and also more persistent intervention.10 The medical advances that underpinned European expansion required the combination of progress in knowledge, technology and organization, as in the struggle against malaria. Enhanced logistics, involving, for example, food preservation, was another aspect of the same process. The combination of advances also greatly enhanced command and control possibilities and, thus, the prospect of predictable operational outcomes. In turn, this made planning more valuable and necessary. Capability was indeed crucial, and will be discussed further, but, from the outset, it is also important to consider norms. Within a world now increasingly considered and treated as an entity thanks to the use of new technology, force and force projection were seen by imperial powers as the way to define both the dominant (yet still contested) definition of legitimacy and its application. For example, the treatment of frontiers witnessed the employment of the Western matrix of knowledge in ordering the world on Western terms and in Western interests. Power and concepts of legitimacy were brought together, especially in the drawing of straight frontier and administration lines on maps, without regard to ethnic, linguistic, religious, economic and political alignments and practices, let alone drainage patterns, land forms and biological provinces. This was a statement of political control, judged by the West as legitimate and necessary in Western terms 11 and employed in order to deny all other existing indigenous practices. These non-Western practices were seen either as illegitimate or, in light of a notion of inherent capability that drew on the competitiveness of Social Darwinism, as less legitimate. This was also the case with norms such as rights to free trade or responses to what was presented as piracy. The spread of Western power was proclaimed as a civilizing mission, with the introduction of reason and law and the replacement of barbarism and custom. Previously accepted practices were now disparaged and criminalized, which forced nonWestern peoples to negotiate with Western power or to face being treated as criminals or even rebels. This transition varied in its difficulty, in part due to the differing impact of Western rule, but, more commonly, as a result of the range of non-Western societies. The impact was material, with new forms of taxation transforming practices of and attitudes towards economic activity and surplus extraction, and also cultural, as social ties and values were undermined and identities put under considerable pressure.12 Resistance could be sharp, as by slave traders in Africa, who resisted the administration of Sudan on

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behalf of the Egyptian government by Charles Gordon, and played a key role in the Mahdist rebellion there.13 This was only overcome by British conquest in 1898–9. The expansion of the West involved multiple psychological pressures, not only those that affected areas that were conquered but also those influencing the treatment of the rest. This was particularly the case because it was as if the entire world had become a Western protectorate. As a result, Western notions became normative as far as the West was concerned. On the global scale, this was very much a late-nineteenth-century process. It was then that a number of hitherto powerful, even aggressive, non-Western states were brought under Western control, as with Burma, Egypt, Bukhara and Khiva, or forced to respond to Western interests and norms, as, to a varying degree, with China, Siam (Thailand), Persia, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.14 The extension of control over frontier areas was an aspect of this response, as it was designed to demonstrate a sovereignty that could constrain Western power, as well as preventing the cross-border raiding on colonies that could serve as a pretext for Western intervention, as with the French in Tunisia in 1881. In the 1870s and 1880s, Japan stepped up the pace of colonization in Hokkaido, and effective sovereignty was also established over the nearby Bonin, Kurile and Ryukyu Islands—the last for a long time a tributary to China. The Chinese suppressed rebellions in frontier areas, particularly in Yunnan in 1873 and Xinjiang in 1879. State power in frontier areas entailed not only military operations but also pressure for the implementation of standard administrative structures and practices. However, as the British also appreciated in India, such ideas were qualified by the maintenance of traditional governmental methods, particularly working through established local potentates.15 The combination of working through existing political and social patterns with a more assertive approach became typical of both Western and non-Western powers, although the emphasis varied for both. In China, the first modern attempts to start military industries using Western technology were the ‘self-strengthening enterprises’, which began in about 1860. The initiative was taken by leading provincial officials, but their options were restricted by the determination to preserve unchanged traditional or Confucian Chinese culture and only bolt-on Western technology. The Self-Strengthening Movement is frequently seen as a failure, largely because of the greater pace of Japanese progress, and because the Japanese defeated the Chinese in 1894–5. The latter led China to adopt more industrial technology, as well as a Western-style of military training and ideology. The focus of this more broad-based reform was the ‘New Army’ of the late 1890s. The Ottoman Empire can be considered alongside the powers mentioned above, but it is unclear how far the ‘sick man of Europe’ should be seen as a state that had lost its claim to power, a Middle Eastern version of Portugal. Declared bankrupt by the Government in 1875, the Ottoman Empire had by 1913 lost most of its European provinces.16 Nevertheless, alongside serious command faults, the First World War was to reveal that the Ottoman Empire contained significant resources, not least the bravery of its troops.17 Moreover, the subsequent problems that Britain and France faced trying to rule the Middle East suggests that Ottoman control until 1917–18 was an impressive achievement. In contrast to European successes against the Incas and Aztecs in the early sixteenth century, the fact that this process occurred in Africa and much of Asia in the late

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nineteenth century is a reminder of the late onset of modernity, understood in terms both of Western dominance, specifically of readily evident superior Western military capability, and of Western international norms. In Africa and much of Asia, furthermore, Western imperialism understood in terms of territorial control was to last for less than seventy years: for Burma from 1886 to 1948 and for Sudan from 1898 to 1956. However, this definition of modernity is now questionable, and increasingly so as Asian states become more powerful. This late onset of modernity clashes with the conventional interpretation of the international order that traces an early establishment of the acceptance of state sovereignty in a multipolar system, an establishment usually dated to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that brought the Thirty Years’ War to a close. However appropriate for Europe, and that can be debated, this approach has far less meaning on the global level. The idea of such a system, and of the associated norms outlined in Europe, was, despite attempts to adapt such norms to specific environments, of little relevance elsewhere until Western power expanded. Moreover, then these norms were not on offer to much of the world or only on terms dictated by Western interests. Thus, many of the problems in dealing with China in the nineteenth century were rooted in Western attempts to coerce China to adopt Western models of diplomatic conduct. The psychological expansion of the West was also one that was ingrained in the minds of Western policy-makers and public opinion. The extent of this process should not be exaggerated as intra-Western disputes and confrontations tended to engage attention to a far greater extent, most obviously between France and Germany, which fought a bitter war in 1870–1 and thereafter planned for fresh conflict or negotiated for alliances to make it less threatening. Furthermore, the commitment of public opinion to imperialism has been queried, even for Britain, which devoted little sustained public attention to confrontations in Europe. Allowing for these points, there was, nevertheless, greater governmental, political and public interest in distant imperial expansion than had been the case earlier in the nineteenth century. In part, this was a question of competition between Western states and of optimism about national expansion and racial roles, as in Germany where the Colonial League was founded in 1882 and the Society for German Colonisation in 1884, and in Russia, where expansion into the Far East and Central Asia was seen as providing opportunities for a national destiny that included supplanting a redundant China and driving back a decrepit Islam.18 This optimism was, in part, a matter of developing and responding to teleological concepts of innate national destiny, concepts that also drew on intellectual developments and lobbies, such as the Imperial Geographical Society in Russia, which supported expansion in Central Asia. More generally, ethnographical research was employed at the service of racialized ideas of national hierarchies. In part, interest in expansion was also a matter of economic pressures focused on both raw materials and markets, although frequently, as with the China market, this was a case of expectation rather than reality. Economic pressures became more intense as the range and volume of goods traded internationally grew, which encouraged interest in new transport routes, such as, by Russia, in the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Chinese Eastern Railway. These were seen as routes of geopolitical power in which strategic and economic achievement and interests fused. More generally, the international relations of mass production were necessarily concerned with both supplies and markets.

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Furthermore, imperial expansion, preference and prohibition shut down supplies and markets for other countries, and this greatly encouraged the sense of competition. These factors were more important in affecting metropolitan perceptions of the nonWestern world than any search by Western powers for alliances with independent states. As a result, the situation with regard to what is now called the Third World was different to that during the Cold War or, less coherently, the War on Terror from 2001. In both of those, interest in economic links frequently took second place to concern about strategic advantage and finding allies ready to fight proxy wars. Instead, during the heyday age of Western imperialism, the alliances that counted were those within imperial systems, as powers sought local assistance within these systems, rather than with independent states, in order to advance and sustain their presence. In military terms, this was crucial, in part because of the difficulties of deploying large numbers of troops overseas, difficulties that reflected the detrimental ecological impact of operating in the tropics, as well as cost and the need to retain regular forces within the West in order to cope with rivalries there. As a consequence, there was a need to recruit forces locally in order to make conquests, as with the British use of Indian forces in the Indian Ocean region, and the French of Senegalese troops in West Africa.19 Furthermore, these units were crucial in grounding and sustaining control of already-conquered regions, as was seen by the use of Indian as well as British troops in overcoming the Indian Mutiny of 1857–9: much of the Indian army remained loyal, particularly the Bombay and Madras units, and forces were also raised by loyal Indian rulers, such as those of Hyderabad, Nepal and Kashmir. This was a key instance of the cooperation that was very important to the general process of imperial rule, an inclusiveness seen in Britain as well as overseas.20 The nature and terms of this cooperation shifted as Westerners became the dominant partners, but they generally did so without overthrowing the existing practices and assumptions with which they were familiar. This was true not only of the position in colonies and protectorates but also of that in other states, such as China, with a shift from Westerners’ presentation of themselves as merchants and as suppliants for favour and, instead, an emphasis on state representation from a superior background. This shift was crucial to a more assertive British position in China from the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839. Despite this assertiveness, the British position in China was not that of a territorial power. Hong Kong was not to become the basis of a major holding. In India, in contrast, in the century from the 1750s, force had played a crucial role in ensuring that Britain became a major Asian empire.21 In what was the most populous part of the British Empire, there was also a careful attempt to incorporate existing hierarchies, interests and rituals within a patron—client relationship. The princely dynasties that had gained effective independence with the decline of the Mughal empire in the early eighteenth century, only to be overawed by the British, were wooed from the 1870s by the creation of an anglicized princely hierarchy that gave them rules and honours, such as the orders of the Star of India and the Indian Empire, in accordance with British interests and models, a process that was also to be followed in Malaya and in parts of Africa, such as northern Nigeria. This led to a stress on status, not race, that can be seen as a brake on inculcating values of economic, social and political development; but this policy was also a response to the large amount of India that had been left under princely rule. As a result, the wooing of support helped to strengthen the British position and, crucially, to consolidate the ‘internal frontier’ of imperialism.22 Status was an intermediary and

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expression of imperial rule and cooperation. Furthermore, the search for support in India and elsewhere was a multilayered one, extending to the co-option or creation of professional and administrative groups able to meet local as well as imperial needs. This cooperation was especially the case in the economic sphere. Although the terms of economic exchange were greatly directed by Western powers, and in areas judged primitive or not yet settled, such as Australia,23 there was an emphasis on force as well as large-scale seizure of land, more generally there was also a need to work with local providers of capital, labour, materials and markets. This local provision became part of the imperial system, not only indirectly but also in terms of long-range movements, as with those of Indian indentured labourers to much of the British empire, for example the Caribbean, South Africa, Malaya and Fiji.24 The movement of Chinese labour across the Pacific, particularly to Australia and the USA, was also significant. It demonstrated, however, the need for non-Western peoples to adapt to Western systems of imperial control. Furthermore, unlike in the 2000s, if China was to be supplied with foreign goods, it would not be on terms driven by the needs of the Chinese economy. Precisely because non-Western societies—for example, the China of the SelfStrengthening Movement25—were not undeveloped, primitive, decrepit or necessarily weak, the Western success in expanding imperial power was a major achievement. On the global scale, it was not a case of Western powers expanding into a passive void of decrepit states and undeveloped societies but rather of the Westerners as an increasingly dominant element in the dynamic non-Western world. Although local cooperation was a key enabler, this dominance clearly owed much to economic factors. The importance of the nature of Western economic development has recently been asserted by Kenneth Pomeranz: Europe’s impact on the colonized societies would have been very different had these conquerors—like so many others in the past—brought with them some significant technological advantages concentrated in a few militarily significant sectors (such as iron and steel) rather than a generally transformed economy supporting a much higher standard of living and radically different patterns of work and resting on very large differences in per capita supplies of energy and other primary products.26 Although part of the burden could be directed onto those conquered and local supporters, this transformed economy also underwrote many of the costs of conquest and consolidation. By 1900, Britain had an empire covering a fifth of the world’s land surface and including, mostly in South Asia, 400 million people; and France had one, mostly in Africa, of 6 million square miles and 52 million people. The relationship between imperial expansion and changes within the West in this period was not clear-cut. It might appear obvious that expansion reflected great-power status, but one of the most impressive episodes of expansion was that of the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and the Netherlands was scarcely a major power. Portugal also extended its African colonies—Angola, Mozambique and Guinea, despite being so weak that Britain and Germany signed a secret treaty in 1898 allocating Angola and Mozambique in the event of Portugal wishing to sell them. At the same time, there clearly was a correspondence, with Britain stronger than France as a maritime power and

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a major centre of finance and industry and, partly as a result, expanding more successfully, although the advantage Britain derived from success in warfare in 1756–63 and 1793–1815 was also crucial. Other states became imperial powers after a process of internal consolidation was followed by a drive to gain and display status as well as to pursue other interests. This was true of Germany, Italy, the USA and Japan. There was also a major process of imperial expansion in the New World. In large part, this was at the expense of native peoples. In 1830, after the close of the Latin American Wars of Independence, these peoples still controlled much of North and South America, but, by 1880, the situation was radically different. This was true of the USA, transforming its geography, in part at the expense of the ‘sub-imperial’ forces, native confederations, that can be described as secondary empires.27 There was also a major process of expansion by Canada, and by the states of Central and South America, notably Mexico, which expanded at the expense of the Mayas; Argentina and Chile, both of which extended their power into Patagonia; and Brazil which did the same in Amazonia. The states also made gains at each other’s expense. This was no longer the case in North America, where the Mexican—American war of 1846–8 was the last conflict to have such a result, but was seen in South America, particularly with Paraguay’s losses to Brazil and Argentina in the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70), and Bolivia and Peru’s losses to Chile in the War of the Pacific(1879–83). In economic terms, Latin America was largely part of a British informal empire.28 The role of other European powers in the region was limited, particularly after the total failure of Napoleon III of France in the 1860s to sustain the Emperor Maximilian as a client ruler, a failure that reflected the difficulty of the task but one that international pressures forced Napoleon to accept.29 However, British economic, financial and maritime influence did not lead to political control. Instead, it was the local powers, such as Chile, that dominated the political situation, not least by intervening in, or intimidating, neighbouring states.30 Force was more commonly used for the pursuit of domestic power, not least due to long-standing struggles between Liberals and Conservatives but also because military intervention proved a key means for the transfer of governmental authority,31 to an extent that was more marked than in Europe. In the Old World, international competition helped ensure that imperial expansion was a far from automatic process and, indeed, the constraints of European power politics took precedence, with the international system registering pressures and turning them into signals of encouragement or restraint. This was seen, for example, in 1898, at the time of Anglo-French tension over Sudan, and also during the Moroccan crises in the decade before the First World War, with French options vis-à-vis German intervention there apparently affected by the damage done to France’s ally Russia by the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), which led Germany to be more aggressive. The constraints of European power politics were not simply a matter of international pressures. Instead, there were also domestic political demands, which were frequently bellicose or at least in favour of expansion.32 The Russo-Japanese War was a conflict in which the costs of war helped produce major strains for both combatants but without leading to the problems outlined by Paul Kennedy in his thesis of defence/war expenditure undermining security. Russian expansion into Siberia and the Far East, where the port of Vladivostok (Lord of the East)

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was founded in 1860, was long term and a deliberate, and sound, policy of economic development. The expense of that expansion was not the key problem for Russia in 1904–5. Diplomatic clumsiness and contempt for the Japanese were more serious. The result was two rapidly industrializing powers fighting a war that neither was completely prepared for, but, crucially, doing a better job than it might have been reasonable to anticipate. Russia faced serious financial problems, but its economy proved more durable than its political system, and the feat of sustaining its forces across thousands of miles of trans-Siberian railway was remarkable. Japan found itself cripplingly short of manpower and building up an intolerable debt burden in London and New York but, more seriously, facing the problem of translating battlefield success into victory in war: it lacked not only enough men and money but also enough public readiness for sacrifice to do so. The scramble for possessions continued without slackening in the early years of the twentieth century. Areas where the Westerners had not hitherto sent troops were made fully aware of the potential of their power. In 1900, the French seized the Touat oasis in the Sahara, the first loss of territory by Morocco for over a century. This campaign, which cost nearly 20 million francs, and for which 35,000 camels were requisitioned in the neighbouring French colony of Algeria, indicated the ability and willingness of the imperial powers to spend in order to achieve results. By 1912, the French had established a protectorate over most of Morocco, the remainder becoming a Spanish protectorate. With columns advancing from both north and south, the French also conquered the Sahara, where effective resistance ended in 1905.33 The range of Western pressure was demonstrated by the British in the same period. In 1900, the Pacific island of Tonga became a British protectorate, while, in 1904, the British advanced to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, in order to dictate terms. This was a region that had experienced Chinese intervention, but never before Western intervention; and the British, or, more correctly, Anglo-Indian, forces that arrived there were signalling a major challenge to the old order. So also, in what became the Dutch East Indies where, on several occasions, the opponents of the Dutch ritually purified themselves for death and fought their final battle (Puputan): armed only with daggers and lances, they were slaughtered by Dutch firepower. In 1911, another area not hitherto conquered by Westerners in part succumbed when an Italian expeditionary force landed in Ottomanruled Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and called their conquest Libya, restoring an ancient name for the region. Another long-established empire lost power to a Western state when, in 1911–12, the Russians established a protectorate in Outer Mongolia, replacing Chinese influence. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Western imperial powers had annexed the overwhelming majority of the territories they sought in the world and had defined spheres of influence in most of the countries still outside Western control, particularly China, Persia and Arabia. For example, Britain and the Ottoman Empire delimited zones of influence in Arabia, an Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 settled hitherto competing issues in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet, while Russo-Japanese treaties of 1907–16 divided Mongolia, denying Chinese power and allocating Outer Mongolia and western Inner Mongolia as an exclusive sphere of influence to Russia, and central and eastern Inner Mongolia to Japan. The 1911 revolution in China and subsequent internal turmoil made Russia’s move on Mongolia possible. Looked at differently, Mongolia’s war of liberation in 1911 was successful because of Russian support. The

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definition of spheres of interest was an aspect of the extension of Western norms and also a form of compensation to ensure that the regional system worked smoothly, this system understood as being based on a mutually recognized regional equilibrium. Although the intention of Western expansion was not that of preparing for a future global, let alone attritional, conflict of the type of the First World War, the consequences were important to the detailed course of the conflict outside Europe, as well as to its more general geopolitics. As the geographical extent of conquest expanded, there was also an increase in rebellion against Western influence and rule. This was not new, but the extent of rebellion in the 1900s was noteworthy and suggests that the capacity of empire to act as an integrating system can only be stressed so much. Many were not involved in the process of alliances and interest aggregation or were not involved on terms that suited them. In large part, indeed, rebellions occurred in response to the implementation of control in newly annexed territories. Revolts in Madagascar and Morocco against the French, and in Natal against the British, were suppressed in 1904, 1906 and 1907 respectively. In areas of Western influence, resistance and rebellion overlapped, as in the Boxer Rising or China War of 1900. The suppression of the rising was a dramatic sign of Western and Japanese power projection, not least because, unlike in 1860, China was not in the midst of a large-scale civil war, although the foreign powers were aided by opposition to the Boxers by the powerful viceroys in the Yangtze area and the south. The Japanese provided the main foreign force at the desperate request of the Western powers. The settlement included the imposition of an indemnity.34 Conflict between Western forces and anti-Western opponents could also shape the boundaries of norms of warfare. In the Philippines, where the USA defeated the Spanish colonial forces in 1898, American annexation was resisted by Filipino nationalists who declared an independent republic and mounted a guerrilla war. This led the Americans to add counter-insurgency methods to their ideology of racialism and divine purpose. Prisoners were killed and prison camps were created in which 11,000 people died. The Americans were eventually victorious, although conflict continued after 1902 when the main opposition forces were defeated.35 In 1905, the rebellion by the Nama and Hereros of South-West Africa against their German conquerors was finally crushed with great brutality. The Germans practised extermination, killing their opponents in large numbers, driving the Hereros into a waterless desert and treating the prisoners sent to labour camp with great cruelty, such that over half the population died there. In 1905, the Germans also suppressed the Maji Maji rising in German East Africa (Tanganyika, now Tanzania), using a scorched-earth policy against guerrilla warfare: about 250,000 Africans died of famine.36 Matthias Erzberger, an opposition politician, was jeered in the Reichstag when he announced that Africans also had souls. Moreover, popular imperialist sentiments, and the reaction to the rising in South-West Africa, led the critical Social Democratic Party to lose votes in the 1907 election, the so-called ‘Hottentot election’.37 To move from famine to the flow of funds may seem brutal but captures the extent to which there was no necessary separation between systems of control and methods of profit. Alongside protectionism that affected attempts to lower tariffs, especially in the late 1870s and 1880s,38 the global economy was characterized, certainly in comparison with the situation between 1914 and 1945, by free trade and international capital flows. In

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the late nineteenth century, international trade dramatically increased. It was largely financed by international investments, which came mainly from Western Europe, with Britain, Germany and France the most important providers. The USA was a major recipient of investment income, a reminder of the extent to which economic flows are often between major powers rather than between such a power and weaker and less prosperous countries, some of whom, indeed, proved only too ready to default on their loans.39 There were also important transfers of technology, particularly from Britain, France, Germany and the USA. Furthermore, these countries organized the world economy, controlling trade, currency payments, insurance and shipping. Improvements in communications and financial infrastructure increased the efficiency of the global economic system and led to a convergence of prices. In turn, widespread migration helped wages to converge. Britain played the central role in this system. The leading naval power by far, it was also the state in which navalism was strongest as an expression of identity, with celebrations—for example, the 1902 Coronation Naval Review—providing opportunities to express both identity and power. In part, this also reflected the strength of business interests, which greatly backed naval expansion in the 1880s.40 If British strategic overstretch can be seen as latent in the 1860s and 1870s, with other states such as Germany and the USA gaining in relative power, there was no power then mounting a sustained challenge to Britain.41 Britain was also the centre of the communication system, not only of shipping but also of telegraph routes.42 The pound sterling was the international reserve currency in a global financial system that relied on a fixed exchange-rate regime and a gold standard for most significant currencies. In 1913, a third of Britain’s wealth was invested abroad, and 14.7 per cent of Britain’s gross national product (GNP) was exported. Germany’s percentage was 12.2. Financial strength gave Britain a key position of influence across much of the world.43 A major form of economic exchange was of manufactured products from western Europe and the USA, for raw materials from the rest of the world: for example, tin from Malaya, palm oil from Nigeria, rubber from Brazil and Malaya, copper and timber from Canada and nickel and phosphate from the French Pacific colonies of New Caledonia and Tahiti respectively. There was also important trade in manufactured products between the key industrial powers, with Germany being one of Britain’s leading trading partners, and these powers also produced raw materials, especially iron and coal. In addition to trades focused on imperial metropoles, major trade links also developed within imperial systems, for example, the export of rice from Burma to India, which led to a substantial expansion in the acreage under rice in Burma to the profit of particular interests there. Conversely, when Japan conquered Burma in 1942, this created major problems for the British in India, problems accentuated by the need to support the large army confronting the Japanese and by difficulties in supply from within India. In the nineteenth century, manufacturing in the major industrial states was dominated by heavy engineering based on working pig iron and steel. The construction of ships and locomotives was particularly important, as was textiles. Industrializing regions, such as the Ruhr in Germany, experienced major population growth. The number of people in County Durham, a centre of mining and shipbuilding in England, rose from 390,997 in 1851 to 1,016,562 in 1891, with a growth of 34.7 per cent alone in the decade of 1861 to 1871. Changes in the urban landscape reflected shifts in society that registered the

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growing dominance of the industrial economy. For example, paintings such as Myles Foster’s Newcastle upon Tyne from Windmill Hill, Gateshead of c. 1871–2 showed formerly prominent buildings reflecting traditional sways—the castle keep and cathedral—now joined by the buildings of change, in this case factory chimneys and the railway bridge. However, the industrial situation was one of flux with, towards the close of the century, new or newly presented resources becoming especially important in the shape of chemicals, particularly based on coal and oil by-products, and electricity. Moreover, new products, such as cars, pharmaceuticals and telephones, provided opportunities for existing and developing industrial sectors and also posed problems of adaptability. Many of these consumer products required new investment and were more dependent on skill and new technology than some of the older ‘metal-bashing’ industries. The balance of industrial power altered with the rise of Germany, which, by 1914, had forged ahead of Britain in iron and steel production and was also especially successful in chemicals, electrical engineering and optical goods. Aside from success or, relative, failure in particular industrial spheres, however, Britain remained the key commercial nation. This is important in the analysis of economic strength as too much of the reading of power has been based on industrial, rather than commercial, indices. This is relevant to the discussion of naval strength, as the wherewithal to pay for it depended heavily on a benign relationship between trade, finance, taxation and borrowing. Shipbuilding required significant capital investment, and this was accentuated by the rapid enhancement of naval capabilities in the late nineteenth century, with marked changes in armour, gunnery and propulsion. The pace of change continued in the early twentieth century not only with the development of Dreadnoughttype battleships but also with the introduction of radio. Kennedy’s emphasis on industrial production in his discussion of British naval mastery has to be supplemented by a stress on finance. Moreover, his stress on battleship numbers, a stress that indeed responds to the Mahanian assumptions of the age, can be expanded to include other ship types and also to question the relationship between battleship numbers and naval mastery. Britain had beaten France in nineteenth-century naval races44 and was to do the same to Germany in 1906–12.45 That Britain had suffered a relative decline in its economic position did not mean that the question of the British imperial succession—which power and by what means, was to take Britain’s leading position—was yet a leading theme nor one that was inevitable. By 1914, American output was equivalent to that of the whole of Europe. In large part, America’s innovatory ethos derived from skilled labour shortages throughout the nineteenth century. Britain, by contrast, had invested in heavy machinery in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, making wholesale replacement expensive, while its plentiful supplies of cheap, skilled labour in any case militated against maximizing technological inputs. The American economy also benefited from substantial natural resources, including coal, copper, silver, iron and timber, the multipliers offered by an extensive rail system, a large domestic market linked to a high level of marketing efficiency, extensive immigration for economic goals (these migrants were regarded at the time as a national asset), a legal code that protected property, a governmental system that supported economic growth, a public assumption of continued growth, a political practice that avoided extremism and an openness to foreign investment. America was a

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prime beneficiary of the global economy, then characterized by free trade and international capital flows, and by large-scale migration.46 These economic shifts had different consequences for power politics. Germany’s marked economic and population growth, in both absolute and relative terms, helped underscore a far more aggressive stance, not least because it permitted the creation of the second largest navy in the world (after that of Britain),47 as well as a substantial army. Germany also sought a’place in the sun’ as an aspect of its ‘ill-defined desire for world power status’,48 with colonial expansion that worried other powers, not least Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Japan and the USA in the Pacific, and Britain, France and Portugal in Africa. However, important limitations remained in the German economy, including an agricultural sector much of which was characterized by a low-efficiency peasantry and industrial activity that often did not match the characteristics of the leading German companies. During both world wars, these deficiencies were to have a serious impact on Germany’s ability to sustain a major conflict. There was a significant delay between America’s mid-nineteenth-century rise to wealth and its later emergence as a world power,49 but American growth had already encouraged a more assertive stance, especially in the Americas and across the Pacific. This was seen as a nationalist project. Indeed, in 1861, William Seward, the Secretary of State, suggested war with France and Spain in response to their assertive Caribbean policy, in order to unite the USA. In 1866, after the American Civil War, American pressure, which included moving troops to the Rio Grande, helped lead the French to abandon their already intractable commitment in Mexico, while pressure also led Spain to end hostilities with Peru and Chile that had begun in 1864. In May 1864, Seward had pressed the British envoy for cooperation over Spanish conduct, adding ‘it might be impossible for the government of the United States to restrain the indignation of the country’.50 In 1867, America annexed Midway and bought Alaska and the Aleutian Islands from Russia, which had annexed them in the seventeenth century. Seward also suggested gaining Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and the Danish West Indies and building a canal across Central America, an idea returned to by President Rutherford Hayes in the 1880s. The pace of expansion picked up in the 1890s, with America annexing Pacific islands such as Hawaii and demonstrating its power in war with Spain in 1898. The conquest of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the arrival of American troops in the Philippines followed rapid naval victories over Spanish squadrons. The peace treaty with Spain left Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the USA, while Cuba became part of the American sphere of influence. By 1914, America was a major power in the Pacific, ruling Hawaii, Midway, Johnston, Palmyra, Tutula and Wake Islands, as well as Guam and the Philippines, and becoming more interested in China and the Far East. This represented a challenge to American concepts of providential manifest destiny, because there were grave doubts about the receptiveness of Pacific peoples to American values, which indeed tended to be racially encoded. These doubts were also expressed about Mexicans and Central Americans. American power, moreover, was dramatized in the new geopolitics of the Panama Canal, opened in 1914, which provided a link for warships and merchantmen between the eastern and western seaboards of the USA. A project originally—and unsuccessfully— begun with French capital ended as a triumph for American engineering and power.

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In 1903, Panama became an independent state carved out from Colombia under American protection, and the USA gained control over the canal zone. America also demonstrated its strength in 1907–9 when the sixteen battleships of the ‘Great White Fleet’ sailed round the world, although, as yet, the USA did not match Britain as a naval power, and this underlined the claim that the latter was the only global power.51 The focus on naval power was not an attitude and policy that simply emerged from American circumstances. Instead, it reflected the development of specific assumptions and interest groups. Some were material, not least the rapidly expanding steel industry, but the most important were the views on American power of east-coast politicians who emphasized navalism. Alfred Thayer Mahan provided, in his much-cited The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), an analysis of naval history, deliberately targeted on a period that seemed to prove the thesis of the title and that apparently demonstrated the value to the USA in following Britain and developing a large battlefleet.52 As a further reminder of the role of social structures and cultural assumptions alongside economic developments, the militaristic stance, however, was far less anchored in American society than was the case in Germany. The respective size of the two armies, and the absence of conscription from the USA, were particularly instructive. Indeed, alongside the limitations in the German economy already referred to (see p. 130), it is worth asking whether the examples of Germany and the USA suggest that greater economic capability led to more assertive powers or whether the roots of the assertion should not, rather, be traced to political-cultural factors, such as the degree and context of militarism and, more generally, the extent to which strategic culture was moulded by domestic drives and anxieties, specifically those of aggressively insecure elites. This was far more the case in Germany than the USA. The German elite was worried about domestic changes, including left-wing activism, as well as international challenges. Reflecting the atavistic roots of much of nineteenth-century militarism and imperialism, of a traditional military and social elite who felt threatened by modernization and so used militarism and imperialism to defend their own privileges, the German regime, like others of the period, was operating in an increasingly volatile situation in which urbanization, mass literacy, industrialization, secularization and nationalism were creating an uncertain and unfamiliar world. The temptation to respond by the use of force, to impose order on the flux or to gain order through coercion was strong. A growing sense of instability both encouraged the use of might to resist, or channel, it, and provided opportunities for ‘unsatisfied’ rulers and regimes that wished to challenge the diplomatic order. In large part, militarism fed itself in Germany, particularly after the failure of liberal revolutions there in 1848. Social and political groups that retained and sought power and responded to the challenges of modernity by endorsing militarism (albeit one drawing on new weaponry as well as a nationalist—racialist notion of will), were prone to react to problems by seeing both them and the solutions in military terms. This was also to become a pronounced tendency in Japan. Moreover, the German capacity to respond to challenges was greater than that of the absolutist regimes two centuries before. In part, this was due to resource criteria, particularly the expansion of population and industry,53 in part to organizational developments, especially communications and bureaucracy, and in part to a population made more reachable and responsive by urbanization and by education under national control. Greater resources were necessary for the war plans of

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the major powers, not least because they required large armies substantial enough to ensure effectiveness on several fronts, which was a particular problem for Germany as a result of the alliance between France and Russia.54 Alongside the economic ‘winners’ prior to 1914, there were also ‘losers’: economies or economic sectors that lost out to competition. In China, there was no comparable economic progress nor a technological advance such as the development of electricity. Railways and textile mills were built and, in the case of mills, owned by foreigners. A sense of failure, alongside the response to foreign pressure, helped both to encourage anti-Western anger, most prominently in the Boxer Movement, and also to undermine the Manchu dynasty, strengthening demands for fundamental political change. The Boxers’ anti-Western anger included ripping up railway lines and destroying telegraphs. The Manchu dynasty was overthrown in 1911 and a republic was created, but regional military leaders or warlords rapidly came to exercise power across much of China. Some were former officers of the ‘New Army’ established after 1895 in order to strengthen China. Many states resisted the globalization of the period by erecting tariffs, although tariffs were also used by states such as the USA concerned to support their own industries. Thus, prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there were already threats to the liberal-economic order, not that these caused the war. There were also problems with the financial system, including a greater demand for gold (with which most currencies were convertible) than was available. This demand helped explain the importance of control over the South African gold mines which was gained by Britain in the Boer War of 1899–1902. This was waged with the republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which had been founded by Afrikaners, the descendants of the Dutch settlers in the Cape, who had moved into the interior after the British conquered Cape Colony in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars. As a reminder of the role of politics in consolidating empire, and of the extent to which it rested on choosing alliances (or being tempted into alliance) with particular groups, victory in the Boer War was anchored when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by a settlement that gave power to the Afrikaners, in a form of responsible government that was very much a ‘white’ solution, and which greatly disappointed the hopes held by some black leaders. Such political alignments underline the limitations of thinking of imperial strength or overreach in terms of narrow geopolitical or economic criteria. The ability to sustain imperial systems politically as well as economically was a key capability, one that was demonstrated by dominion and colonial military support for Britain during the Boer War;55 but it was a capability that was to be gravely and, in some cases fatally, weakened as a result of the First World War, although during that conflict this support was very extensive, particularly from Australasia, Canada and India. Neither ‘winners’ nor ‘losers’ explain the cause of the First World War, though a perception of relative loss was crucially important in helping centre anxieties and a felt need for action in particular conjunctures. This perception is linked to the question of imperial overstretch. In the 1900s and early 1910s, there was ambition that can be regarded as imperial overstretch, but anxiety was also a major aspect of this ambition, indeed, in part, its cause, course and consequence.56 This anxiety can be seen in alliances, such as the Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany and Italy in 1882, but these alliances

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appeared inadequate in the 1900s and early 1910s as anxieties grew about shifts in international geopolitics and national politics. This was particularly so of an Austrian elite worried that the breakdown of Ottoman power was leading to a degree of assertiveness in the Balkans, especially by Serbia, that threatened the cohesion of the Austrian empire. Whether that empire was itself overstretched in the face of rising nationalism is a matter for controversy, but political disputes related to nationalism made it difficult to pursue policy initiatives and also helped create a destabilising sense of the enemy within. Ironically, the real danger to the Austrian empire came not from Slav nationalism but from a bellicose German nationalism on the part of much of the ruling elite, and this accentuated both domestic and international weaknesses.57 The question of whether an empire became overstretched in the face of rising nationalism, that is, that an empire can become overstretched even as it rejects significant further territorial expansion, was also raised by the British Empire in India. Internal shifts there interacted with a developing nationalism. Echoing the Roman Empire (see p. 5), overstretch did not emerge as a question of how far a power extended. In the case of Germany, there was concern about the problems of its Austrian ally and the problem of having Austria as an ally. Neither power was to restrain the other sufficiently and, instead, in the First World War, the geopolitical logic of alliances drew powers into actions that were highly damaging and, in the end, destroyed the logic of the alliances. There was also German concern about the developing nature of Russian offensive capability, a capability financed by France, not least in the shape of railway construction in Russian Poland.58 Ironically, the Russian attack on Germany was to be easily defeated in 1914, and much of Russian Poland was conquered by the Germans in 1915. The Germans, both military and politicians, had consistently over-estimated Russia’s military potential. There is nothing to suggest that this was deliberate, but the misperception proved very powerful. This underlines the emphasis elsewhere in this book on the importance of perception and self-perception (see p. 7). There was also, however, an ambition on the part of German leaders that was more clearly a case of wishful thinking and strategic overreach, that for developing the capability of a global power in the shape of a navy able to contest the seas with that of Britain. In practice, this was unnecessary to Germany’s goals within Europe. Moreover, naval ambition was likely to alienate Britain and, therefore, to ensure that these goals became unattainable, as indeed was to be the case in the First World War. The assumption that Britain’s differences with France and Russia would remain insuperable was a crucial mistake. The Japanese elimination of Russia as a naval power in 1905 also undermined Germany’s calculations as it helped to magnify the German challenge in British eyes. In the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), Germany had won despite French naval strength. In any future struggle, if Britain remained neutral, Germany could hope to trade both with her and with the USA, thus deriving an economic benefit that would make it easier to pursue her goals within Europe. Such goals became an overreach only if combined with a navalist policy, the cause of which can be traced not so much to a rational assessment of the situation as to a feeling of inferiority towards Britain. This directs attention to those who directed the policy, particularly Kaiser Wilhelm II, who dominated German politics from the 1890s, in part by concentrating political power, not least through destabilizing ministries by his appointments policies and his use of

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ministerial reshuffles.59 The role of individuals is not readily compatible with determinist and structural explanations of international relations, but it emerges as crucial if particular crises are considered. It is necessary to ascertain what ideas such as national interests, and concepts such as honour, meant to specific individuals and groups at particular junctures.60 At a national level, the role of naval ambitions also draws attention to differences in strategic culture that challenge some systemic models. These differences, moreover, affected powers that had access to similar weaponry. Thus, Britain had to protect maritime routes that provided her with food and raw materials, while challengers, particularly France in the late nineteenth century, Germany in both world wars and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, sought a doctrine, force structure, strategy and operational practice that could contest these routes.61 Strategic cultures were also affected by geographical changes. Thus, just as the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, had changed the geopolitics of British power by making the Middle East far more significant to the Anglo-Indian axis of the British empire, so the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 transformed the strategic place of the Caribbean in naval plans and greatly increased the flexibility of the American navy by making it easier to move warships between the Atlantic and the Pacific.62 Less dramatically, railways transformed the situation on land where they became a central part of the infrastructure of empire and a vital tool of modern warfare. In both these roles, attitudes towards railways and their capability developed a politico-strategic and technical logic which, to an extent, imposed itself on international politics. A railway mentality fostered an offensive approach to war by making mobilization and logistics seem more plannable and therefore biddable. War by timetable appeared possible.63 Railways were also a major cultural symbol of imperial power, especially in India. This underlines the importance of culture as an aspect of great-power status (see p. 13). Major differences in strategic cultures on land were a case not only of planning, but also of the political context of policy-making. Elite ethos were far from identical, with the republicanism of the French and Americans leading to a different pattern of cohesion and obedience to that of autocratic imperial monarchies. There was also a contrast between a German elite, willing to see war as a tool of policy, and others, for whom it was an unwelcome necessity. Developments in military thought and practice were also pertinent. The ability to destroy the enemy’s military effectiveness encouraged a sense of war as a testing ground of states. Moreover, the application of reason to war was related to an understanding of war as reason. Thus, the traditional cultural bellicosity of the landed elite was linked to a more ‘modern’ planned warfulness, both focusing on the monarch as symbolic and government leader. The nation-state or national empire were the other key building blocks, as they provided not only the resources but also the commitment that made the militarized policies of mass armies possible. Nationalism sapped both cosmopolitanism and internationalization and was fostered by the development of national education systems purchasing educational works in the vernacular and the rise of publication in most of the European languages. The arts vied to support national accounts and to assert far-reaching national identities, while the process of reifying and making more inclusive the tangible community denoted by terms like ‘das Deutsches Volk’ (German people) was taken further with the emergence of discrete ‘scientific’ disciplines of history and geography.64

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These tendencies were not restricted to the Western world. In Japan, an avowed modernization and state-building included the foundation of a compulsory primaryschool system. This was created in 1872 almost simultaneously with the introduction of conscription, and the two systems were always intended to work in partnership: schools teaching boys to venerate the nation and the military; the military teaching young men to serve and sacrifice for the nation. Within Western colonies, however, such as India, where the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, and in composite empires such as Austria,65 movements for national consciousness and self-government underlined the extent to which great-power status was constantly changeable. This status was being challenged, if not unmade, at the same time as it was constructed—and understandably so, as perceptions were a key to power while the alliances that contributed to power shifted in their character and goals.

7 Bids for power, 1914–42 Power and resources The early twentieth century witnessed a number of bids for power as states sought to drive their way up the hierarchy of strength. The successive bids for power mounted during this period sought to revise existing arrangements, and to do so by force. The range of revisers stretched from, in 1914, the Austro-Hungarian military, keen to punish Serbia, and the Turks, seeing an opportunity to reverse losses in recent decades in Thrace and the Aegean to, by 1918, Communists intent on the spread of world revolution, specifically to Germany and Poland in 1919–20. In part, there were challenges to the coherence of imperial systems posed by subversion, whether, for example, German attempts to encourage Muslim dissidence in the British empire during the First World War (1914–18), a policy already suggested by the Germans to Russia in 1904, or the Soviet hope that Communism would undermine the European colonial empires. Russia itself left the First World War as an eventual consequence of revolution there in 1917. Revision, however, is frequently a matter of perception and is also compatible with a desire for new gains, as with the Turkish interest, during the First World War, in gains in the Caucasus at the expense of Russia and even for an extension of influence into Central Asia. In part, an emphasis on resources in the power politics of the period is appropriate, especially in the attritional later stages of the two world wars. At the same time, it is necessary to consider how resources were used, not least by making qualitative assessments about military effectiveness and the creation and management of alliance systems. Even in the First World War, the most gruelling of conflicts, habitually seen on the Western Front as the most static of wars, the constraints of trench warfare could be overcome, as they were by the Western allies (Britain, France and the USA) in 1918, leading to the defeat of German forces in the field. This is a reminder of the need to consider not so much resources as their transformation into the successful conduct of operations. This was a process that in part was a learning one in which such independent variables as planning, strategy, tactics, command skills and systems, and morale, all played a major role. They shaped, as well as responded to, new technologies.1 Moreover, they did so in a competitive context. Resources were important in this context, and concern to deny or gain them gave point to such policies as the Allied blockade and also to German determination to seize resources in Eastern Europe. However, the variables mentioned above were also significant, as was the interaction of warmaking with political determination and dissent. The last proved important in undermining the German alliance system in 1918, with the Austrian empire, in particular, crumbling. It is also necessary to give due weight to a range of operational factors, including Erich Ludendorff’s poor generalship in the offensives on the Western Front that year (his

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emphasis on sequential attacks on different parts of the Western Front, rather than a sustained drive in one sector), as well as the extent to which the German army suffered more seriously from the influenza epidemic than its British and French opponents. Yet, as a reminder of the difficulties of discussing policy and explaining events, the switching of the point of attack was also one of the crucial factors in Allied success after August. Earlier, in thwarting the German attack on the Western Front, the effective Allied conduct of the defensive, the limitations of the offensive in this period and superior Allied resources were all crucial. The most prominent bids for power in the period of this chapter were made by Germany and Japan, but it would be misleading to treat these as unique. Other states also sought to revise the existing distribution of power, most prominently, in the 1930s, Italy under its dictator from 1922 to 1943, Benito Mussolini, who very much had imperialist drives. States pursuing gains included some that were certainly not major powers: for example, Serbia, as, through the union of peoples, it transformed itself into Yugoslavia in 1918, and the Saud dynasty in Arabia in the 1920s. This serves as a reminder that the acquisition of territory was a widespread goal. Indeed, the pursuit of territorial gain was arguably more insistent as a theme in international politics in the aftermath of the First World War than in the period of imperial expansion over the two decades prior to the outbreak of the war. This contrast owed much to the extent to which that war led to the collapse of the German, AustroHungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires, which ensured that territory in Europe and the Middle East was redistributed to an extent and at a rate that was unprecedented. Outside the Balkans and Scandinavia, European borders had been fixed since 1871, but the situation now abruptly changed. Furthermore, the successor states established in eastern Europe—Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia—were relatively weak, and this created a volatile situation that was open to exploitation by aggressive states. This was to be part of the run-up towards the Second World War as Germany, in 1938–9, exploited its newly recovered strength to re-order eastern Europe in its own interests. Germany, however, was not unique in this, as was seen not only with the Italian conquest of Albania in 1939, but also, nearly two decades earlier, as the Communists, as part of their success in the Russian Civil War (1918–22), sought to regain the areas that had become independent or autonomous in the collapse of the Russian Empire. The Communists were successful in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine and the Soviet Far East, but failed with the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Finland and Poland. This failure owed something to great-power intervention, especially by Britain and France, but more to the determination of the population not to be engulfed by the Russians and their local Communist allies. Indeed, this exemplified, yet again, the role of consent in imperial expansion. If there was only limited support for the anti-Communist Whites in Russia, there was even less support for Communism in the areas into which the Communists sought to advance, such as Poland, in large part due to anti-Russian nationalism. Within the West, there was a major shift of power as a result of the First World War, not only from the defeated powers but also from the European victors (Britain and France), to the USA. As part of a key process of industrialization and of economic mobilization for war, American financial, industrial and agricultural resources had been

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very important to these victors, particularly Britain. The USA had fed the Allies in 1917. However, the real American industrial achievement was post-1941 and not post-1917. Compared to the Second World War, shipbuilding was still modest and, in terms of tanks and aircraft, the USA was dependent on Britain and France. The financial strain was also acute: American national debt went from 1 billion to 27 billion and, by November 1918, 70 cents in the dollar of state spending was borrowed. The American contribution in combat in 1918, moreover, was modest compared to those of Britain and France, although there were about 2 million American troops in north-west Europe by the time of the armistice on 11 November 1918, and more American than British troops on and behind the Western Front. If the war had continued into 1919, the American military, with three armies in the front by December 1918, would have been the cutting edge. As it was, the prospect of many more American troops fighting was crucial in signalling a sense of shifting advantage towards the Allies. After the war, the USA refused to join the new League of Nations as President Woodrow Wilson had planned and, therefore, did not act as guarantor of the post-war international settlement and its commitment to security, which proved to be a fatal weakness for the settlement and the League. However, Wilson’s unwillingness to give the League its own army and to commit American troops to it (he preferred the armament of economic sanctions), was a major long-term drawback that cannot be blamed, like the refusal to join the League, on the Senate, as also was his refusal, instead of a League army, to accept the compromise idea of alliance with Britain and France. Wilson’s support for national self-determination could not be followed through—in part because Congress would not ratify the peace settlement but also because of the serious difficulty of implementing the idea of national self-determination in the light of differences on the ground and the power politics of local and leading European states. In short, there was a lack of realism on Wilson’s part.2 Furthermore, although the USA had purchased the Danish West Indian Isles (St Croix, St John and St Thomas) in 1917, it made no attempt to gain territories as a result of the war. Instead, in the western Pacific, it was to be Japan, which had taken the German territories before the USA entered the war, that was the prime beneficiary of the disposal of the German Pacific empire, gaining the Caroline, Mariana and Marshall Islands. Although Japan was not allowed to fortify these League of Nations’ mandated territories, and did not do so, nevertheless, this left the American possessions in the region, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island more exposed in the event of war with Japan. In both world wars, a drive for a stronger position in the global hierarchy of power was expressed through the seizure of territory by the states that launched the conflicts: Austria and Germany in 1914, and Germany and Japan in 1937–41. This seizure was the cutting edge of a process that also involved the development of a more potent industrial capability and military, the construction of a stronger alliance system and the disruption of that of opponents. These, however, were also symptoms and aspects of a widely grounded commitment, by both decision-makers and publics, to particular ideologies. Those of Social Darwinism and nationalism were key, although they had different manifestations in individual states. Militarism was also crucial, as it was widely believed, especially prior to 1914, but also in the authoritarian states of the 1930s, that the use of force was individually and collectively ennobling and that it was important to mould nations and strengthen states by engaging in wars. The last finds an echo in the claim

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among modern scholars that strong states emerge through surviving conflict.3 These ideas were dominant in the German and Austrian elites primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.4 Both were confident that war was an aspect of policy and could be managed with success,5 and each neglected to give due attention to the possibility of failure and to the democratic, or at least destabilizing, consequences of mobilizing the Home Front. Turning to the means of success, the diplomatic dimension is an important element that can be too easily forgotten as a result of the customary emphasis on industrial capability and military size. The uncertainty of alliance systems indeed serve as a reminder of the indeterminate nature of the conflicts of the period, in the sense that it was unclear which states would be involved and on what sides. In the First World War, this remained true until 1918, when Russia finally dropped out of the war, ending Germany’s commitment to a two-front struggle. This uncertainty and unpredictability was seen throughout the conflict. Would Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914 lead Britain into the war, an issue on which the British Cabinet was divided? It did. Would Turkey take part in the war? It did, on the German side. Would Italy abandon its allies, Germany and Austria, and join its opponents, as it did in 1915 in return for the promise of territorial gains? Would the USA enter the war, as it did in 1917? These issues were not mere side questions, of no real consequence to the conflict between Germany on the one hand, and France and Russia on the other. Instead, they affected the balance of forces and helped define strategic parameters and operational possibilities. Furthermore, the diplomatic dimension was, to a considerable extent, an independent variable of the campaigning. No state wanted to join an alliance that was collapsing, and all were encouraged by signs of success, with Romania’s decision to join the Allies in 1916 largely a result of the successes of the Russian Brusilov offensive against Austria; but the progress of the fighting on the key fronts did not determine the decisions of others to participate. Instead, there were crucial issues, such as Italian territorial claims at the expense of Austria and American concerns about German policies, including unrestricted submarine warfare. These issues ensured that the diplomatic dimension interacted with the campaigning. As far as the latter was concerned, the unprecedented nature of the conflict, which owed much to the demographic and industrial strength of the states involved, posed major difficulties, not simply in sustaining the struggle but also in conceiving of practical strategies and operational methods. The resulting development of attritional policies on land and at sea offered important options that reflected the difficulty of securing victory in a single battle or campaign.6 There was also an uncertain character to the Second World War, even up to its last month, when the Soviet Union joined the war against Japan rather than, as the Japanese hoped, continuing its neutrality and maybe helping to arrange peace negotiations. The uncertainty was clearest in 1939–41, when the roles of Japan, the Soviet Union and the USA were all unpredictable. Thereafter, the absence of more than tentative approaches for separate negotiations—for example, between the Soviet Union and Germany—helped give a far more clear-cut impression to the war. So also did the fact that no major power on which an entire front of the war was completely dependent had a collapse comparable to Russia in 1917–18, and thus no major power of this type left the war until Germany was conquered and surrendered in 1945. However, although Britain’s refusal to negotiate, and the support of her empire (and of the American economy), ensured that Germany still

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had a western front after the comprehensive defeat of France in 1940, France was a major power, with the third biggest military and second biggest empire in the world. Indeed, France’s defeat was key to the character and longevity of the war. The resource-based approach to war seems particularly pertinent for the Second World War in 1942–5, as the competing sides were then fixed, although more than resources were at stake in victory. The USA and the Soviet Union were wedded to concepts of operations that were founded upon a significant advantage of resources and, therefore, industrial capability. There was a deliberate use of superior resources in the sure knowledge of victory, but Soviet operational art and, even more, American warmaking also reflected a determination not to be limited to attritional methods. American commanders were especially keen to avoid the casualty rates their troops had suffered in 1918.

The 1920s It is easy to understand why a discussion of great powers in this period rapidly becomes an account of the world wars, with the intervening period treated as a preparation for the second. However, it is also appropriate to underline the uncertain character of this interwar period, which included uncertainty about what was at stake and a lack of agreement about the military and political lessons of the First World War. Modern judgement of decisions and developments in that period should reflect this uncertainty. Most centrally, the 1920s should not simply be seen as a prologue to Hitler, and, as a result, the Versailles peace treaties that followed the First World War should not be held responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War. Instead, the management of the European state system in this period had a distinctive character in which the international order was affected by the contrary pressures of nationalism and internationalism. The peace treaties led to an assertion of nationalism, but the failure of Wilsonian idealism did not lead to the end of internationalism. Instead, in finance as in diplomacy, there was a strong interest in a viable and consensual international order, with new institutions serving as the foci for multilateral diplomacy. Attendance at the meetings of the League of Nations became almost mandatory after 1925. If governments used the older concert of powers and balance of power mechanisms in response to the problems of the day, they therefore also contributed to an international system with more positive norms.7 Attempts to replace ‘hard’ power by ‘soft’ power in the inter-war period by means of implanting liberal internationalism, attempts with which Britain was closely associated, were, however, to be resisted, for ideological and revisionist reasons, by Soviet, Fascist, and Nazi policy-makers and by those convinced of an aggressive view of Japanese national destiny. A major challenge was posed by the Soviet Union. Its admission to the international system was grudging, while Soviet attitudes were also a problem. In practice, the hopes of world revolution, with Moscow as the centre and inspiration of this new power, and the carrying forward of wartime methods in order to ensure Communist success,8 were subordinated to the more pragmatic interests of the Soviet state. Nevertheless, Soviet propaganda and the activities of the Comintern (Communist International), and of Communist parties, known and suspected, went beyond the confines of acceptable

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diplomacy.9 The problems of eastern Europe were also significant, with the new states of the region divided, in large part due to competing territorial aspirations. This helped ensure that they were unable to support effectively the stability of the new international system.10 Again, as today, there was also the question of which war or type of war was likely to occur. The range of present possibilities today may seem extensive—the USA having to prepare to fight China, as well as to persist in the ‘War on Terror’, or to address issues in Latin America—but there was also an extensive and uncertain range for the major imperial powers in the 1920s. It was unclear, at the start of that decade, whether it would be possible to stop Soviet expansion short of full-scale war, in part because, prior to Polish victory in the battle of Warsaw in 1920, Soviet strength seemed particularly potent; and, thereafter, it was uncertain whether there would be subversion as a result of pro-Soviet activity. States, in the end, did not succumb to labour activism in this fashion, but such problems had been anticipated, as in the USA where War Plan White was designed to tackle this threat. Moreover, it was unclear how far it would be necessary to fight in order to defend imperial possessions. The problems this task entailed were greatly extended by the expansion of these possessions into the Middle East, as Britain and France made gains of League of Nations’ mandated territories from the dismantling of the Turkish Empire: France gaining Syria and Lebanon, and Britain, Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan. New technology, however, could seem an answer to these issues of control and to the specific problem of strategic overreach. Aircraft appeared to be a key capability advantage, providing both firepower and mobility, and, albeit less dramatically, the same case could be made for mechanized vehicles. Indeed, aircraft were used extensively, not least by the British in Iraq. This weaponry, however, proved less effective in practice than theory.11 The relationship between overreach and resources in the 1920s is a complex one, not least because of the financial overhang from the First World War in the shape of large war debts. Although only in Russia were economic fundamentals transformed, and then through revolution, the war had hit the European economies hard. Aside from the destruction in the First World War of manufacturing plant and transport routes (although this was far less than in the Second World War), there was tremendous damage to trade and, therefore, economic interdependence. They were hard-hit by the Allied blockade of Germany and the German submarine assault on Allied trade, with the British losing about 3 million tons of shipping. The disruption of trade (and its total collapse outside Europe in the case of Germany), and the diversion, under state regulation, of manufacturing capacity to war production ensured that the European economies were less able to satisfy demand. This encouraged the growth of manufacturing elsewhere, not least in Latin America and in European colonies such as India, while the wartime profitability of neutral lines meant that their shipping was better placed from 1918 than that of Britain. The USA, which did not enter the war until 1917, benefited most of all. The British war effort rapidly became heavily dependent on American financial and industrial resources. Britain sold much of its foreign investments in order to finance the war effort. After the war, the British sought to recreate a liberal economic order focused on free trade and a revived gold standard, although it is necessary to note the self-interested nature of this commitment to internationalism, for the liberal order very much served British interests. In the face of the economic nationalism of rivals, particularly France and

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the USA, the major problems of servicing debts and the limitations of conventional financial and monetary concepts, the British had only limited success.12 Russia under Communism became a markedly anti-liberal power, while German economic relations with the victorious Allies, particularly France, were far from cordial. This economic nationalism at the level of the major powers interacted with an extensive opposition to market mechanisms. Instead of these mechanisms, there was a widespread state-backed and tariff-enforced emphasis on domestic industrial production that was seen, for example, in the newly independent states of eastern Europe, such as Poland.13 The terms of the world economy were now set by America, which became not only the world’s largest industrial power but also the largest creditor. New York replaced London as the world’s leading financial centre. American industrial growth satisfied domestic demand, not only in well-established sectors but also in the growing consumer markets for cars and ‘white goods’, such as refrigerators and radios. Consumerism was encouraged by the availability of credit. The spreading use of electricity helped economic growth, and the rise of plastic as a product affected several branches of manufacturing. New plant and scientific management techniques helped raise American productivity, which increased profitability and consumer income and, therefore, the size of the domestic market. American economic expansion was not matched elsewhere. The British and German economies revived slowly, with the Germans suffering serious inflation, and the Russian economy under Communism played only a minor role in world trade. As a consequence, the USA became the major international lender in the 1920s. However, America’s economic strength and protectionism lessened its ability to take imports, and thus enable other countries to finance their borrowing. Moreover, although economic and financial strength certainly defined America as a great power, its strategic role and military strength were far more restricted. The USA had one of the largest navies in the world, but its small army was not really combat-ready, and the contrast, and lack of cooperation, between the two branches weakened the planning that took place.14 Military weakness interacted with a lack of sureness of American policy in international relations, certainly insofar as translating vague goals into coherent planning was involved. The Americans played a part in European diplomacy, but their presence in the Middle East, which was left to the control of Britain and France, was very restricted. In essence, the USA acted, unilaterally, as a regional power in Latin America, occupying Nicaragua in 1912–33; but, even there, the American role was very restricted, with withdrawals from Nicaragua and Haiti.15 Elsewhere, the USA took a non-interventionist part that did not match its economy. Given the problems that affected Europe in the 1930s, it was unfortunate that the USA did not take a greater part in fostering stabilization there over the previous decade, while no arrangements were made with Japan that might have limited its expansionism. This passivity again opens up questions of the definition of great powers. The extent to which a definition should include an interventionist role designed to foster stability might, however, be seen as very much a liberal nineteenth- and twentieth-century view that was not more widely applicable. The USA, in some respects, instead, resembled early nineteenth-century China. In contrast to the USA, Britain and France remained actively engaged in imperial consolidation and strengthening, seeing economic modernization not as an alternative to empire but as likely to increase its value to both metropolitan and colonial populations

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alike. Paul Kennedy emphasized overstretch in his account of inter-war Britain, but, active in many spheres, British power should not be underestimated,16 not least because she remained the leading naval shipbuilder. The American government proved unwilling to match this.17 At a more modest level of strength in the 1920s, China does not merit inclusion in the list of great powers. It was less subject to external intervention than in the 1900s and 1910s, and the Guomindang (Nationalists) had brought a measure of consolidation, continuity and stability.18 There were also economic consequences. The apparent unification of the country by the Northern Expedition of 1926–8 was followed by important improvements in public finances, communications and industry. A unified currency and a central bank were introduced, the tax on internal trade was ended, there was a major expansion in the road and, to a lesser extent, rail systems, and industrial output rose. However, growth was concentrated in Manchuria and the coastal provinces, and the impact on the remainder of the country was restricted. Evidence about agrarian conditions is limited, and the extent of agricultural development is a matter of controversy. There appears to have been an important rise in output, but there was no transformation of agriculture. Moreover, foreign military forces stationed on Chinese soil scarcely indicated Chinese power, and unification was largely illusory. The Guomindang, in practice, shared power, and much of the country was controlled by provincial warlords. More generally, for much of the 1900s–1950s, the Chinese self-image was one of weakness and of catching up with the ‘great powers’. In the brief Sino-Soviet War of 1929, the forces of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang were trounced with heavy casualties. This indicated the Soviet Union’s determination to maintain Imperial Russian interests in the Far East. This was taken forward, after the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931–2, with the brief Soviet— Japanese conflicts at Changkufeng in 1938 and at Khalkin Gol/Nomonhan in 1939. These demonstrated the ability successfully to deploy force at a distance from the centres of Soviet power and to check Japan. For Russia, the crisis consequences of defeat and revolution in 1914–21 had proved far shorter than the drawn-out Chinese crisis which had become apparent from the late 1830s. Allowing for the deceptions of Soviet propaganda and for the disaster of rural collectivization, there was also important development in the Soviet economy, not least because there was continuing scope for recovery from war and revolution, as output in 1928 was still below that in 1913. There was a major expansion of the industrial sector and of electricity generation, albeit as a result of the state-driven focus of resources on developing industry at a heavy cost in terms of the everyday life of the population. Military industry was greatly expanded, due to its having a highly placed patron in the shape of the Red Army to push for investment and resources, as well as the presence of Communist military thinkers who recognized the need for a comprehensive peacetime organization for war. This was a drive that was not restricted by meaningful pressures limiting investment such as concern for consumer well-being. Military industry was also encouraged by an ideology of foreign hostility that characterized even Communist moderates, and the extent to which Stalin’s rise to power was supported by a military high command concerned by the effort of the fiscally conservative Communist Right, such as Bukharin, to resist the rise in military spending. All these together contributed to an extensive development of military industry.

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The catalyst for full militarization was Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which brought forward concern about Japan as a strategic threat in the Far East and provoked a full-scale industrial mobilization. This included expanding bases and forces in the Far East and retooling the heart of Soviet heavy industry for armaments production. The cost was immense, but levels of production, such as 4,000 tanks a year (in place of about 1,000 annually until the end of 1931), far ahead of anything else in the world, were achieved, and there was never any meaningful retreat from that level of production.19 Despite massive dislocation caused by German advances in 1941 and allowing for the help provided in 1941–5 by the Western allies—for example, American lorries and jeeps—this economic growth was to sustain a large-scale military effort in the Second World War. The Japanese, in turn, developed a powerful military—industrial complex in Manchuria. This reflected the greater understanding outside the West (compared to previous centuries) of the need for industrial capacity as a basis for warmaking.

Military choices Goals and strategic cultures are linked to military tasking. The variety of tasks that militaries might have to face in the 1920s is a reminder that ‘transformation’, in the shape of new capability, the dominant theme in accounts of revolutions in military affairs, has to be understood in interaction with tasking. What, for example, was the use of air power expected to achieve: overawing opposition or securing control on the ground? This was an issue that faced the USA in Nicaragua. It is pertinent to remember that this is a twoway process: capability can help shape tasking and, indeed, affect the assumptions referred to as strategic culture. Nevertheless, on the whole, it is tasking that sets the terms within which capability becomes operative, not only because of procurement issues but also due to priorities for training and to the very decision to embark on conflict. The crucial, and related, issues of procurement and prioritization indicate that, far from capability flowing automatically, or semi-automatically, from new developments, it is necessary to understand that, at any one time, there was, and is, a range of military options available for fresh and continuing investment. At sea, in the 1930s, for example, it was possible to emphasize the role of gunnery in future ship-to-ship clashes, or air power, or amphibious capability, or submarines.20 Indeed, the possibility for enhanced capabilities that stemmed from technological developments made this situation more difficult, because the range of possibilities grew at the same time that real costs rose. As a cause of further difficulty, at the same time, the possibility of interchangeable usage among weapons and indeed personnel diminished as a product of the need for specialization in both weapons specification and training in order to obtain cutting-edge advantage. These problems both ensured the need for greater claims for proficiency on behalf of particular options, in order for them to justify support, and led to a related need to rank options, whether weapons systems, organizational models, doctrines, or tactical and operational methods. This competition was (and is) one of the contexts of discussions about military change. Claims about the potential for change become a prospectus that encourages support, or, looked at more harshly, a key aspect in a bidding war, and one where the so-called military-industrial complex is to be understood not as a monolith but

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as a sphere of competing interests, each advancing its case through bold claims. This is very much the case with the politics of procurement, but this element receives insufficient attention. Linked to this was the issue of prioritization. This involves the need to consider the range of tasks and how best to respond to this variety. Thus, for example, in 1936–7, it might have seemed necessary in Britain to invest in tanks in order to confront the possibility of a continental war with Germany,21 but, as far as the threat environment was concerned for Britain, there was also the prospect of naval action against Italy in the Mediterranean and against Japan in the Far East. Furthermore, there were large-scale current obligations in the shape of the Arab rising in Palestine and the Waziristan campaigns on the north-west frontier of India. Earlier in the decade, the British had faced the Saya San uprising in Burma. Far from there being any tradition of appeasement, the critical term applied to Anglo-French military—diplomatic policies in 1931–8, these policies were as much a matter of competing tasks and, therefore, an issue of prioritization,22 as of any clear-cut strategic overreach forcing a cautious response to aggressive moves by other states or of a deliberate diplomatic strategy. Even if the colonial dimension was neglected (and for Britain, France and Italy, this was not feasible), there were serious choices. Should France focus on defence against Germany, or should it also assume Italian antipathy, which challenged the maritime routes from France to North Africa and Lebanon/Syria and would require more investment on the French navy? How far should the USA emphasize Latin American issues, and how far should it expand its military to cope with the challenge from German and Japanese militarism? If there was to be war with both Germany and Japan, which should be the focus of initial American attack? From 1935, the Army War College’s plan exercises assumed Germany.23 More generally, how far should any inter-war revolution in military affairs focus on offensive or defensive capabilities, and how far were weapons systems suited to one appropriate for the other? Furthermore, what would be the social implications of modern warfare, and could they be successfully managed? Such choices did not end with the outbreak of the Second World War. Instead, they changed and became more serious. A lack of clarity about allies and enemies made it difficult to produce effective strategic plans.24 Thus, in considering how best to deter Japan, British policy-makers factored in China, the Soviet Union and the USA in order to create a shadowy, ‘virtual’ alliance to maintain the position in the Far East, but the value of this ‘no-bloc’ policy was very unclear.25

The Depression Policy choices were, in turn, affected by economic possibilities. Initially, the 1930s provided fewer options than the 1920s. The overheating American economy collapsed as a result of a bursting speculative boom in share prices in New York in October 1929, the Wall Street Crash. This bursting of an asset-price bubble became far more serious as the inexperienced central bank cut the money supply. The tightening of the financial reins, including the calling in of overseas loans, caused financial crisis elsewhere. At the same time, the 1930 Smoot—Hawley Act put up American tariffs and depressed demand for imports. Other states followed suit, leading to a worldwide protectionism that

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dramatically cut world trade by 1932. The USA was not the sole source of the crisis. There was also a separate source of financial crisis in Germany. Far more than the mismanagement of financial and trading systems, however, was involved. There was also a more systemic problem, of the weaknesses of liberal and international economic practices, now referred to as globalization, as a result of the political and ideological potency of nationalist economic views. This emerged in response to the economic crisis as states sought individual security through protecting prosperity.26 As export industries were hit, unemployment rose substantially across the industrial world. In the USA, the rate rose to nearly 32 per cent in 1932, by when manufacturing was at only 40 per cent of capacity. The worldwide decline in consumer and business spending hit industrial production. At the same time, the industrial world’s imports of raw materials declined, affecting commodity producers both in the industrial world (for example, British coalfields) and elsewhere. This brought serious economic and political problems throughout the developing world—for example, in Latin America and Australasia. In addition, these producers were now less able to finance imports. Indeed, at the same time that it led to the attempt to strengthen imperial economies through protectionism, the Depression of the 1930s also did much damage to the relationship between homeland and colonies, gravely weakening imperial links. This lasting damage was not undone by the subsequent experience of the Second World War. The Slump and the subsequent Depression destroyed the liberal economic order, led to a collapse of confidence in capitalist structures, undermined democratic governments so that, with the exception of Scandinavia, there was only one democracy east of the Rhine by 1938, and led to a marked deterioration in the peacefulness and stability of the international system. It became more difficult to obtain capital and technology from abroad, while, as a result of the economic crisis, governments increasingly thought and planned in national, rather than international, economic terms. This led to a measure of corporatism, as governments sought to direct both labour and capital, and this was conducive to a closer integration of economies and national policies. In the case of empires, the ‘national’ meant the imperial, as efforts were made to find economic safety through existing political links. The economic manifestations included currency blocks and imperial preference in trade, as well as, in the case of Germany and Japan, ambitions for territorial expansion. As a consequence of the closer integration of economies and governments, economic possibilities could be altered by political action, most obviously in Germany where there was a major shift towards military expenditure. The German economy had not suffered fundamental losses as part of the First World War peace settlement, and the reparations it paid were not too serious a burden. Germany received more in loans, which were never repaid, than she paid as reparations for the wartime damage she had inflicted. As a consequence, despite serious limitations, the German economy could serve as the basis for a new war effort. Germany’s Four-Year Plan, introduced in 1936, developed production of synthetic oil, rubber and textiles, while Japan stepped up synthetic oil production in 1938. In the Soviet Union, industry was boosted everywhere, and industry in the Urals and Siberia increased in the same proportion as in other regions. This increase, however, had clear strategic consequences, as the already-strong metallurgical industry in the Urals served as the basis for an expansion of industrial production that proved to be beyond the

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range of German air attack. Major new industrial capacity was also developed near Novosibirsk in south-western Siberia, while new plants were built in Soviet central Asia. Nevertheless, the extent of the German advance in 1941–2 was not anticipated, and this affected earlier evacuation plans.27 In Britain, in contrast, confidence in peacetime planning was limited until the Second World War. In part, such planning was discredited for conservative British politicians by its association with the Five-Year Plans of the Soviet Union and its command economy, but, more generally, it was unacceptable to the powerful financial community whose views were central to British economic strategy until 1940. In the USA, however, the welfare and economic reforms known as the New Deal, introduced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt after he became president in 1933, led to greater federal economic intervention, although without a recovery in production to the level of the late 1920s. The New Deal was also central to the growth of federal soft and hard power vis-à-vis states and local communities. In some countries, there was a measure of economic recovery in the late 1930s from the depths of the Depression. Government borrowing and rearmament, driven by Hitler’s determination to reverse the verdict of the last world war, revived German economic activity. The British economy was helped by the combination of loose monetary conditions (following departure from the Gold Standard in 1931) with orthodox fiscal policy, by low commodity prices and by consumer demand from the prosperous section of the country. Public works played only a minor role in Britain as they were seen as likely to crowd out the private market. However, economic policy brought scant relief to the British heavy industrial sector, which did not grow appreciably until rearmament in the face of the German threat. As a reminder of the difficulties of judging policy choices, the Depression gave rise to a critique of the traditional belief in ‘sound finance’, which had meant a balanced budget and low expenditure and taxation. This belief was criticized by John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). He called for public spending to be raised in order to cut unemployment and was ready to see very low interest rates and to tolerate inflation, a departure from conventional monetary policy. It is far from clear, however, that such a policy was bound to work. Keynesian monetary policy really required a closed economy with very little liquidity. Moreover, pumppriming public spending designed to stimulate the economy, such as that in the USA and Sweden, still left unemployment high. Unemployment only fell below 15 per cent in the USA in 1940, although, by then, GNP per capita was 954 compared to 615 in 1933. It is unhelpful to imagine that there was a readily apparent fiscal policy for national power. Moreover, fiscal policy was bound up with the self-image of governing elites, not least thanks to the totemic resonance of terms such as ‘sound money’ or ‘prudent’. Therefore, it is necessary to give due weight to the role of perception, especially as an aspect of the extent to which best practice was a political concept and choice. This was true for fiscal and other aspects of policy.

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The Second World War Evaluating the Second World War from the perspective of earlier uncertainty about military tasking casts further doubt on the idea that military change is straightforward, either in terms of analysis of what is occurring or with reference to its consequences. Few prepared for what was to happen. For example, the Germans were not really preparing for blitzkrieg and instead learned from their successful war of manoeuvre in Poland in 1939 what could be achieved. This was linked to the politics of command preference within the German army, as Hitler felt emboldened to advance particular generals. The rapid defeat of France in 1940 reflected German military strengths at the tactical and operational levels but also owed much to the serious deficiencies of French planning, particularly the use of reserves,28 as well as the experience of the Polish campaign. The Germans would probably have been less successful had they attacked the French in 1938. A more successful Anglo-French defence in 1940 might have repeated the situation in 1914, enabling the Western allies to make more effective use of their superior economic and financial resources and of their geopolitical position, specifically their position on the oceans and their ability to thwart access to them by the Continental powers. This would have contributed to the attritional strategy the British intended to pursue and would have posed serious problems to Nazi Germany.29 As the First World War had shown, French defensive strength was, thus, a crucial adjunct to British power, and therefore an important aspect of a world in which American economic power was not yet matched by political and military primacy. Furthermore, as another problem for Germany, the tasks its military were set did not arise in a predictable fashion. Thus, an air force designed essentially for tactical purposes was called upon to play a strategic role against Britain in 1940–1.30 Similarly, pre-war navies sought carriers and submarines only as a subordinate part of fleets that emphasized battleships, the Japanese navy providing a particularly good example. In short, force capabilities were developed for particular goals, and then it was discovered that they could be, and had to be, used in other contexts. The Second World War was ultimately to see the successful deployment of American and Soviet resources in order to secure the crushing of Germany and Japan in 1944–5. The extent of these resources was already apparent earlier in the war. Thus, in 1940–1, the ability of Britain to continue trading with the USA was important to the survival of the country, although, per capita, Britain derived much more support during the war from the Canadians.31 Furthermore, in 1940 and early 1941, Soviet cooperation in providing resources was important in enabling the Nazi economy to draw on raw materials. Conversely, in late 1941, Soviet resources were indicated by the ability to continue fighting and producing fresh forces, despite major losses of territory, manpower and productive capability. This ability became even more apparent in 1942–3. Resources were important, but the tangled web of diplomacy in the early years of the war indicates the degree to which ideological factors played an important role in developing the narrative of conflict. These factors, however, involved choice. In place of the left-wing tendency to emphasize the struggle between Fascism and Communism, and thus between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, it is pertinent to note that

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opposition to Britain and to liberal values was a key to the policies of both Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, the latter’s response to Hitler powerfully reflected his own animosity to Britain. In each case, there was hostility to Britain’s political position but also a rejection of its liberalism. This was a product not only of a rejection of liberal capitalism as a domestic agenda for liberty and freedom but also hostility to it as an international agenda focused on opposition to dictatorial expansionism and, instead, support for the independence of small states. This was seen when Britain entered both world wars in support of such states, Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939. Both Hitler and Stalin were reacting against Enlightenment, liberal and capitalist values. This was linked to the antiWestern turn in Nazi anti-Semitism in 1938–41, such that, ‘the war in the West against Churchill and Roosevelt was no less an ideological war than the war for Lebensraum in the East’.32 Stalin was more than willing to subordinate the cause of international Communism, about which he was anyway dubious, to that of state-expansion in concert with Germany. In August 1939, the Ribbentrop—Molotov (Nazi—Soviet) Pact was celebrated in Moscow with Stalin toasting ‘the health of this great man’ Hitler. In 1940, Neville Chamberlain fell when British failure in the early stages of the war had compounded doubts about his pre-war policy of appeasement; and Chamberlain in the spring of 1939 had moved to an anti-German policy. Stalin, in contrast, made no such move. The nearest equivalent to the British guarantees to Poland and Romania in 1939, guarantees that led Britain to declare war after Germany attacked Poland later that year, would have been Soviet guarantees in 1941 to Yugoslavia and Greece, followed by a declaration of war when they were invaded, but Soviet policy was very different.33 Indeed, under the Nazi— Soviet Pact, Stalin joined in the attack on Poland and annexed eastern Poland. The brutal Soviet system was particularly ruthless in conquered areas. In 1939–40, 1.17 million people were deported from Soviet-occupied Poland to Soviet labour camps,34 and in 1940 about 127,000 more were deported from the occupied Baltic states. Many others who were not deported were slaughtered. The great power that was under acute threat by the summer of 1940 was Britain, understood to mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its imperial possessions and its Dominion allies. The notion of overreach appears especially pertinent for Britain in the winter of 1941–2 when Japan joined in on the Axis side and there was greater pressure over the allocation of forces, particularly British warships and, with considerable political contention, Australian troops.35 Prior to that, strategic overreach was a factor but also looks less pertinent, given that Britain was not alone in the face of the now-nearby German juggernaut, as is often said, but, instead, supported by the largest empire in the world and able to trade with the most powerful economy, the USA. Indeed, greater engagement with both Britain and China was also affecting American foreign policy by 1940–1.36 Albeit with the powerful additional challenges mounted by air and submarine power, the Germans posed another instance of the threat to Britain earlier offered by Philip II of Spain and by successive French rulers. Britain, however, was in a stronger position than it had been in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not least because of the size and resources of the British overseas system37 and the economic strength of the USA. For example, the British were able to obtain strategic metals, such as tungsten (from Canada and the USA) and manganese (from Africa) to strengthen steel. This was of great value for munitions, not least, in the

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case of tungsten, for armour, armour-piercing shells and high-speed cutting tools. The Germans did not have this access to transoceanic sources of supplies. The air and submarine attacks were designed to hit the British war economy and, to that extent, reflected a materialist conception of conflict. However, they were also seen as a way to hit British morale. This reflected Hitler’s presentation of war as a struggle of will, a widely held view, and also the idea that strategic bombing could dislocate an opposing society. Thus, the 1940 War Manual of the British air force claimed that a nation was defeated when its people or government no longer retained the will to prosecute their war aims, and that strategic bombing was a means to this end.38 If bombing was designed to destroy will, as well as resources, it was but one of the means employed to transform societies as an aspect of total war. German military and political ambitions expanded rapidly in the early stages of the war. There was interest in acquiring naval bases in the Atlantic, from where it would be possible to threaten British convoy routes, to increase German influence in South America and to challenge American power. This was an aspect of the goal of the Naval Staff that Germany become a power with a global reach provided by a strong surface navy.39 The Navy did not drive German policy, but concern about the Atlantic was important to German strategy. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, was in part designed to put pressure on Britain: anxious about the USA, Hitler was worried about his narrowing options.40 Thus, Hitler repeated Napoleon’s attempt to invade Russia in order to get at Britain in 1812 by strengthening the Continental System designed to block trade between Britain and Continental Europe. However, this comparison does not capture Hitler’s concerns that he had not much time left to fulfil his goals nor the extent to which, during their alliance, the resources of the Soviet Union contributed to the German war economy. Napoleon, moreover, lacked the German concept and practice of race war, which was to play a central role in Hitler’s quest for power in eastern Europe, not least in the categorization of the conquered population as a preparation for the brutal treatment or slaughter of whole groups. To Hitler, war with the Slavs was a racial war in which the Germans would earn their right to survive and triumph, creating a Europe that they would dominate. What might be termed a racialized aspect of the quest for power was not new. Indeed, as an aspect of race identification, the concept of martial races employed by Western powers when developing client military forces in the Third World was based, in part, on a creation of ethnographical identities. Moreover, in their conquests in Africa prior to the First World War, the German army had become used to seeing entire ethnic groups as race enemies and had developed the practice of racial conflict. This they transferred to Europe, first in Belgium during the First World War and, far more clearly, consistently and violently, in eastern Europe during the Second World War. Racial violence was displayed in Poland in 1939, while the massacres of black French soldiers in 1940 showed that the German army was also willing in western Europe to embrace the Nazi notion of racialized warfare and its murderous applications.41 The genesis of German racial conflict can therefore be traced to transoceanic imperialism, but in eastern Europe the race violence was more central to German power. The brutal use of forced labour was one aspect of the way in which German companies were also complicit in this process.42

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As a reminder of counterfactuals, or the what-ifs stemming from the unpredictable nature of developments, Stalin had a nervous collapse of will on 28–30 June 1941 when the German advance reached Minsk, the capital of Belarus. There was possibly consideration of a settlement with Germany, similar to that reached by Lenin in 1918, which might have been used to vindicate such an agreement. There was also a panic in Moscow in mid-October that owed much to official actions, including the movement of industrial plant. Managers and other officials fleeing were attacked by the workers they were abandoning in scenes described by the head of the Moscow NKVD (secret police) as ‘anarchy’. Stalin, however, decided not to flee, and the NKVD was used to restore order, just as it accompanied the winter Soviet counter-offensive, meting out punishment and terror.43 Despite serious Soviet deficiencies in command, training, weaponry and strategy—the last a dangerous reliance on forward defence—the German attack suffered from a major failure of planning and preparation. Over-confident of the prospects for a swift offensive, and completely failing to appreciate Soviet strength, the Germans also suffered from a lack of consistency. Goals shifted over the emphasis between seizing territory or defeating Soviet forces and also over the question of which axes of advance to concentrate on. This led to a delay in the central thrust on Moscow in September 1941, while forces, instead, were sent south to overrun Ukraine and to destroy the Soviet forces there. The gain of the resources of Ukraine and the crushing of Soviet armies there then appeared more important than a focus on Moscow. The delay in the advance on the latter hindered the Germans when they resumed it, not least because the Soviets proved better than the Germans at operating in the abnormally difficult winter conditions. Although the Soviet government was evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga, there was no military or political collapse comparable to that in France in 1940, and the Red Army was able to hold the assault on Moscow, their communication and command centre, and to mount a counter-attack launched on 5–6 December 1941. Once their advances had been held, the Germans lacked strong operational reserves to cope with counter-attacks, and they found it difficult to stabilize the front in the face of those attacks.44 Having failed to translate conquest and killing into victory in 1941, the Germans returned to the task in 1942, although they now lacked the resources and tempo to attack along the entire Russian front as they had done in 1941. The 1942 campaign, moreover, revealed not only Soviet resilience but also serious German deficiencies in strategy and operational art. From the outset, Operation ‘Blue’, the German 1942 campaign, was jeopardized by a poorly conceived and executed plan. The Germans sought the seizure of the Caucasian oilfields in order better to prepare for the lengthy struggle that American entry into the war appeared to make inevitable: most of the world’s oil supplies were under Allied control (USA, Iran, Iraq), or closed to the Axis by Allied maritime strength (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela). Hitler, however, underestimated Soviet strength and also failed to make sufficient logistical preparations. Furthermore, there were major flaws in the development of the operation, specifically in the decision to attack simultaneously towards the River Volga as well as the Caucasus, while Hitler’s conviction that the city of Stalingrad on the Volga had to be captured, foolishly substituted a political goal for the necessary operational flexibility. German strategy was, therefore, both misguided and poorly implemented. Despite a massive commitment of resources, the Germans were

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fought to a standstill at Stalingrad, which had been turned, by their air and artillery attacks and by a determined Soviet defence, into an intractable urban wasteland. Furthermore, the improvizations that a lack of German preparedness had made necessary in 1941 had not been overcome. The German army was divided between elite mechanized units, capable of acting as mobile striking forces, and the bulk of the army: infantry that relied heavily on horses for moving supplies. The problems of distance and weather posed by operating in the Soviet Union accentuated and exposed the difficulties arising from this contrast.45 An improvement in Soviet fighting quality was also clearly demonstrated, not least by the differences in Soviet offensives. The large-scale Soviet counter-offensive in the winter of 1941–2 had eventually run out of steam, in part because, like the German offensives on the Western Front in 1918, it was on too broad a front,46 while that in the winter of 1942–3, mounted by divisions formed the previous winter, was better prepared and managed. At the same time, effectiveness has to be considered not in the abstract but relative to the fighting capability of the opposition. This can be seen in Operation Uranus—the encirclement of the German Sixth Army in and near Stalingrad—in November 1942. The Soviets benefited greatly in this operation from their build-up of forces, not least as a consequence of the recovery and development of their munitions industry—for example, in tank production—but their advantages were magnified by the success of their planning and preparations. The poor quality of German command decisions was also crucial. These included the allocation of peripheral sectors that became, as a result of Soviet attacks, key flank positions to weak, less motivated and less well-armed Romanian forces. A poor German response to the Soviet breakthrough was also crucial. Hitler forbade a retreat from the city by the Sixth Army before it was encircled.47 If the outbreak and early progress of war between Germany and the Soviet Union reflected counterfactuals, the same was true of Japanese policy. The bid for power by Japan was, in part, an attempt to take advantage of the opportunities provided by French and Dutch defeat at the hands of Germany, as well as the extreme pressure Britain was under, but there was also a concern about the apparently intractable nature of the Japanese commitment to China and a wish to close down possible means of supporting resistance there. By 1941, China was a pale shadow of the great power she had been in the early nineteenth century. Much of its territory was under Japanese control, and, with the Japanese trying to create client governments,48 it was by no means clear that China as a major political entity would survive. Nevertheless, Chinese resistance continued, and this caused major problems for Japan. Alongside this wider tension, there were differing views in Japan on the desirability or need for conflict with individual powers, including the Soviet Union and the USA; as well as the institutional priorities and interest of particular army and navy lobbies including the powerful army in Manchuria. This all amounted to a range of possible tasks and, thus, a lack of clarity as to the military—industrial capability that would be necessary. For Japan, there was also the more profound uncertainty, seen repeatedly with major powers, as to whether it was necessary to act in order to retain and secure greatpower status, or whether such action might actually jeopardize it. The second was the likely result predicted in the summer of 1941 by the Soryokusen kenkujo (Institute of Total War Studies) that had been instructed to investigate the matter.49 In the event, the

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attack on the USA ensured this outcome. In the case of Japan, this uncertainty looked back to the self-perception by its leaders from the 1880s. This often emphasized Japan’s weaknesses relative to the USA and also to China and the Soviet Union, in terms of land and resources. By the end of May 1942, the Japanese had overrun Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Singapore, British Borneo and Burma, lands the combined population of which was far greater than that conquered by Nazi Germany. The Japanese also captured Attu and Kiska in the western Aleutian Islands. Despite having much of their military tied up in China, Japanese forces benefited from outfighting their opponents, who were weak and poorly prepared; from air superiority; from the operational flexibility of their plans; and from the combat quality and determination of their units. This was particularly seen in Malaya where the Japanese were outnumbered. There were also serious Allied command and operational lapses, as with the loss of most of the American planes in the Philippines on the ground to Japanese attack on 8 December and the British failure to provide adequate land-based air cover to their leading warships in the region, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off Malaya two days later: both were sunk by Japanese planes. Land-based air support was necessary: had the warships been escorted by a carrier, there was a very good chance that the carrier would have been sunk as well, bearing in mind the fate of Hermes sunk by Japanese aircraft that April. Furthermore, the British conduct of operations on the ground in Malaya and Singapore was badly flawed.50 Initial Japanese successes left the Allies with an unprecedented extent of territory to regain. The situation was very different to Europe. Drawing equivalents is compromised by very different force-space ratios, let alone the role of sea as opposed to land, but the distance between Stalingrad and Berlin did not match that between, say, Guadalcanal and Tokyo. The problems facing the Americans were compounded by a number of factors, including inexperience: rehearsal for the Guadalcanal landing revealed serious difficulties with the coral and a lack of experience in amphibious operations, not least naval gunfire support.51 Nevertheless, the military and political reasons why the Japanese had failed earlier to knock China out of the war indicated that their ability to plan and execute major advances and to inflict major defeats (equivalent to German blitzkrieg or lightening-war offensives) did not lead to victory. China could only deny Japan triumph, a defensive victory of sorts; but the USA was to be able to wage offensive warfare against Japan successfully. American entry into the war also made a key difference against Germany. By the end of 1942, American forces were actively engaged in the wider European theatre, advancing east in French North Africa after landing on 8 November at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, in Operation Torch.52 As yet, American power had not been brought decisively into play against German land forces, but already it had made a major difference in the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines. The combination of the American contribution to convoy protection with the even more important ability of American shipyards to produce a large quantity of merchantmen provided a margin within which Allied anti-submarine techniques (including the application of intelligence information) could be applied successfully.53 Already responsible for 31.4 per cent of world manufacturing in 1938 (com-pared to 12.7 for Germany, 10.7 for Britain and 9.0

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for the Soviet Union), the USA, helped by its sophisticated economic infrastructure, successfully adapted its economy for war production.54 Soviet resilience and American intervention were not dependent on German policies but were related to Hitler’s multiple strategic failure. The latter helped ensure that Germany would lose, but it remained necessary for the Allies to win.

8 The fall of empires, 1943–91 A series of empires fell in this period, although the processes involved were very different. First, Allied victory in the Second World War led to the destruction of the Nazi and Japanese empires in 1944–5. This great-power conflict was followed by the passing of the European colonial empires, that of the Dutch in the East Indies followed by the end of the Belgian, British, French and Portuguese empires: a process completed in 1975 when Portugal granted independence to its colonies. In the late 1980s, increasingly serious and insoluble internal political and economic strains and dissidence led to the collapse of the Soviet empire (and Communist system) in Eastern Europe, which was followed, in the early 1990s, by that of the Soviet Union itself. Very different factors were at work in these various processes, with the collapse of the Soviet empire involving very little fighting. The very diversity presents obvious problems of classification and definition: alongside force and organizational factors, it is pertinent to note the role of political factors in encouraging the spread of Western power and, conversely, of these political factors in undermining it. The latter encourages a focus on the role of ideology and belief, in both periphery and metropole, in making rule by others seem aberrant rather than normative. This is crucial to the contrast between growing technological prowess on the part of the major powers, and the more limited role they sought, and success they enjoyed, as imperial powers. The most successful—China in Tibet and Xinjiang—also owed its success to demographic weight and the opportunities it created for settlement. It is, therefore, appropriate to note that other factors have to be assessed alongside technology. Focusing solely on the latter, superiority in forms of military technology and military—industrial complexes underwrote Western capability in naval and air power, where their effect was fundamental; but precisely the same forms of superiority in technology and industry had a far smaller impact so far as land power goes, certainly insofar as asymmetrical conflict was concerned. A fairly similar pattern, of greater relative power at sea and in the air than on land, is emerging with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) today, although the latter also gives Western armies far more power on the conventional battlefield. Nevertheless, dethroning technology from its central role in military capability, let alone the causes of success, helps explain why the Western powers were unable to prevail in many of the conflicts in the Third World. Turning back, this demonstrates, more generally, the need to understand the role of cultural assumptions, and political activity, in the analysis of military history and international relations.

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The fall of the Nazi and Japanese empires The impact of political considerations, both at the centre and in the metropole, on the cohesion and continuity of empires was much more pertinent for the fall of the European colonial empires and for that of the Soviet Union than for those of the Nazi and Japanese empires. The fate of the last two was settled in conflicts involving their principal armed forces. It is true that the Nazi empire lost support due to political factors, with the defection of allies, such as Italy in September 1943 and, more significantly, Finland, Bulgaria and Romania in 1944, but this loss reflected the result of campaigns, while these defections, although they had regional importance in the course of the war, were not strategically significant. Although, despite Japanese concern about a separate peace between Germany and either the Soviet Union or the USA and Britain, the two leading Axis powers remained allies, distance precluded any serious form of cooperation. In his radio address of 9 December 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried a ‘joint plan’ between Germany and Japan: ‘all the continents of the world, and all the oceans, are now considered by the Axis strategists as one gigantic battle-field… We must realize for example that Japanese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operations in Libya’. In practice, assistance through diverting opposing forces was more feasible than joint planning, and, as the Allies took the initiative, even this option disappeared. Toward the close of the war, Hitler was very keen to transfer advanced weapons technology to Japan in order to enable her to fight on, but this was not viable, and the two powers had common enemies rather than shared aims and objectives. The failure of the Nazi and Japanese empires as integrating systems capable of winning mass support was more serious. In each case, they elicited a considerable amount of backing in some conquered areas, such as Croatia in 1941–4 and Albania in 1943–4,1 and Germany’s Bulgarian ally in Macedonia; but there was no equivalent to the range or extent of support that the Western powers were able to secure in parts of their colonial empires. There was also considerable opposition, including from nationalists in India, some of whom helped the Japanese, although to negligible military effect.2 The key point, however, was that the Indians held the line and did not break even in the time of disaster in 1941–2. As 2.3 million Indians served outside India, the British ability to limit opposition on the Indian Home Front was key to their success in the Middle East and, far more, Burma. In contrast, the Germans and Japanese embraced beliefs in racial superiority that, to a considerable extent, precluded cooperation with other peoples: the Japanese never understood the force of nationalism other than their own, and the Germans never wanted allies, only associates who would do what they were told. The Japanese were generally seen as new conquerors, not liberators from Western rule. The brutality and exploitation of the Germans and Japanese as occupiers or allies seriously compromised possibilities for support—for example, in Ukraine, for the Germans3—and also accentuated serious economic mismanagement. In New Guinea, where some of the population had treated Japanese forces as liberators in 1942, there was a reaction against Japanese conduct that led to cooperation with Allied reconquest, not least in providing crucial carriers for supplies. The forced employment of millions of foreign workers, especially Soviet, Polish

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and French, who were brought to Germany and generally treated harshly, if not murderously, was not a way to ensure labour commitment or efficiency, while it also compromised the appeal of cooperation with Germany.4 However, large quantities of matériel were also produced by the inmates of Soviet gulags—forced labour camps. The German leadership had also made fundamental errors in understanding the nature of the war and their enemies, and by 1944, certainly, the Soviet army had acquired a superiority of technique that produced a series of massive, overwhelming victories that destroyed nearly 100 German divisions. Had the Germans won over the population of the Soviet areas they occupied and had an effective anti-Communist cement for their system, then this might have affected American policy as well as developments on the ground. However, the nature of German policy and rule made this outcome impossible. Furthermore, given the thoroughness, skill and brutality of the Soviet advance in Eastern Europe in 1944–5 and the resources enjoyed by the Allies in the Second World War, it would probably not have mattered had the Germans enjoyed more support in the areas they occupied. For different reasons, the same is the case with Japan, as it was not necessary for the Allies to reconquer the bulk of the territories Japan had seized in order to ensure its defeat. Indeed, at the close of the war, the Japanese were still in occupation of Malaya, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, most of the Dutch East Indies and much of China. Instead, the foci of Japanese power, in the shape of the fleet, the Manchurian army and the homeland’s security5 were all overwhelmed in 1944–5, by the American navy, the Soviet army and the American strategic bombing offensive respectively. The latter stages of the Second World War more clearly demonstrate the role of resources than their earlier years, because the sides were now fully defined (although the Soviet Union did not attack Japan until the closing month), and the conflict was far more attritional than in its early stages. This did not mean that strategy played no role, but it pushes attention back to the respective strength of the war economies. For example, in 1944, the availability of oil helped determine Japanese naval dispositions, affecting their response to the American movement against the Philippines.6 Numbers and power were crucial to the disparity of force, but there was also a strategic dimension, and in 1944 the Americans out-thought and outfought the Japanese. The Americans were able to fight the attritional battle with Japanese air and naval power in the certain knowledge that such a battle could be won, and the ability to bring major superiority to bear was an expression of skill as well as strategic capability. A focus on industrial strength, specifically the manufacture of weapons, underrates the agency of military skill. This skill was not a single factor but, instead, an interacting range, stretching from strategic insight and planning to unit cohesion and tactical competence. Furthermore, a dynamic characteristic was provided by the extent to which these factors changed. Crudely, there was a marked increase in Allied fighting quality, one seen, for example, by comparing the British army fighting the Germans in 1940–1 and Japanese in 1941–27 with the same army fighting both in 1944–5, or the Soviets fighting the Germans in 1941 with their success in 1944–5, or the Americans fighting the Germans in 1943 with their success in 1944–5. These improvements were not simply a question of an acquired capability for attritional warfare, nor a matter of a contrast between German and Japanese effectiveness at the operational level and Allied at the strategic.

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Conflict was important not only to the course of the struggle, but also to the ‘Home Fronts’. In June 1940, General Archibald Wavell, Commander of British Forces in the Middle East, wrote from the British Middle East Headquarters, The internal security problem in Egypt, in Palestine, and in Iraq, and elsewhere occupy a very great deal of the attention and time of the Middle East Staff. An improvement in propaganda may help the situation, but only military successes or evidence of strength and determination will really do it.8 Propaganda reflected the sense, even among the totalitarian powers, that popular support had to be wooed and was an aspect of a re-education of the public that ranged from eating habits to political goals.9 Posters, films, radio, newspapers and photography10 were used for recruitment, to boost production, to motivate and to assist rationing and conservation of resources, and they linked the Home Front to the front line. Confidence in popular responses, however, was less pronounced than might be suggested by a focus on the wartime propaganda of togetherness. The Nazis, for example, had to confront the lack of popular celebrations when war broke out.11 In the Soviet Union, the heroic stereotype of the Red Army soldier bore scant reference to the reality, not least to the marked contrast between nationalities: the Central Asian recruits had little understanding about the purposes of the war.12 Interpretations focusing on resources, economic mobilization13 and ‘Home Fronts’ tend to underrate the extent to which the Axis was also out-fought: on land, in the air, and at sea, in Europe, in the Pacific and in Burma. In doing so, these approaches also appear to support self-serving German and Japanese interpretations that emphasize their wartime fighting quality and suggest that they lost only because they were outnumbered. This, indeed, takes up themes of the period, for example, the Nazi argument that they were defending civilization against Asiatic ‘hordes’, in the shape of the large Red (Soviet) army. To this day, on the German side, there is still a tendency to regard their defeat as due to being beaten in resource production by the Allies and to minimize or ignore the extent to which they were outfought. This is a parallel to the earlier tendency, after 1918, to blame defeat in the First World War on everything other than the Allied ability to defeat German forces on the Western Front, an interpretation that served Hitler’s purposes as he searched for domestic culprits. For the Second World War, all too much of the work on German war-making is based on post-war analyses of their own campaigns by German commanders and staff officers. These place the responsibility for defeat on resource issues as well as the size and climate of the Soviet Union and, above all, Hitler’s interventions. Hitler, indeed, was a seriously flawed commander, especially in defence, due to his unwillingness to yield territory and his consequent preference for the static over the mobile defence. By concentrating decision-making and being unable to match Stalin’s ability to delegate, Hitler ensured that there was no alternative way to provide sound command decisions, and, by 1944, his diminished grasp on reality seriously exacerbated the difficulties of German command. Alongside this approach, it is argued that, probably by early September 1942, Hitler had realized that final victory was out of reach and was determined to fight on in order to destroy Europe’s Jews, as well as to achieve a moral victory for his concept of the

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German people. This notion of self-destruction became a decisive part of the regime’s ideology.14 It is important, however, to stress that Hitler’s deficiencies were part of a more general failure of German warmaking, not least its emphasis on will: specifically, the inability to make opposing states accept German assumptions. As in 1914, when the Germans invaded France and Belgium, launching what became the Western Front of the First World War, the will to win could not be a substitute for a failure to set sensible military and political goals and to think of attainable fall-back positions. Post-war German analyses also tend to ignore archival evidence that highlights battlefield mistakes by German commanders15 and do not consider the issue of Soviet fighting quality, a subject emphasized by excellent American work that has benefited from the opening of some of the Soviet archives after the fall of the Communist regime.16 The flaw in the standard analysis of the Eastern Front is not simply a matter of technicalities but, rather, an aspect of a more wide-ranging German failure of perception. For example, most German commentators do not appreciate the extent to which, from the outset, and not only on the Eastern Front, the German army was involved in atrocities. Indeed, the army’s military violence against unarmed civilians was not a matter of rogue commanders but, instead, was integral to its conduct during the war.17 The widespread German failure to appreciate this is a reflection of the sanitization of the Wehrmacht’s reputation during the Cold War. The Japanese equivalent in explaining failure includes an overemphasis on Allied bombing, especially the dropping of the atom bombs. There is also an unwillingness to address the issue of comparative fighting quality in the field in 1944–5. A major improvement in quality was seen with the Australians in New Guinea, the British in Burma and the Americans in the Pacific.18 In the Pacific, it was necessary for the Americans to develop a host of skills. Improvement in amphibious operations entailed, for example, reconnaissance and firepower.19 It was also important to improve carrier warfare techniques, a formidable task because of limited pre-war experience in this field. These techniques and doctrines had also to include the unfamiliar sphere of cooperation with other surface warships. A variety of factors, aside from carrier numbers, were involved in American victory. In the crucial Midway campaign in 1942, Japanese failure reflected factors particular to the battle as well as more general issues, including the use of their submarines.20 In the campaign, the Japanese were seriously hit by flawed planning and preparation. They underestimated American strength, while their deployment in pursuit of an overly complex plan and their tactical judgement were both very poor. Yamamoto also exaggerated the role of battleships in any battle with the Americans. In contrast, although there were serious flaws, particularly with torpedoes that did not work,21 American preparation was superior. This included the ability to intercept and decipher coded Japanese radio messages, enabling them to out-think their opponents: the American intelligence failure of Pearl Harbor was more than rectified. In addition, the Americans were able to mount an effective repair effort, returning to service the carrier Yorktown, damaged at the battle of the Coral Sea earlier in 1942. Furthermore, Japan had violated its initial strategy of seizing the key resource area and sufficient land to provide defence in depth and waiting for the inevitable American counter-attack by building up the defence from Japan’s rather limited industrial base and hoping that the USA would

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avoid the cost of battle. Instead, the Japanese gave in to ‘victory disease’, to use their own phrase, and stayed on the offensive, weakening, if not wasting, forces. In part, this was a response to the American carrier-based Doolittle air raid on Tokyo and other cities on 18 April 1942 which helped lead the Japanese to the failed, flawed attack on Midway. Despite these systemic American advantages, the battle of Midway still had to be won on 4 June 1942. Far from being an inevitable result, it was a near thing which reflected American tactical flexibility, as this was a battle in which the ability to locate opposing ships proved crucial, while, as with combined arms operations on land, the combination of fighter support with carriers (in defence) and bombers (in attack) was important in order to minimize losses and to counter Japanese advantages in fighter aircraft quality (the Zero was quicker and more manoeuvrable than the Wildcat) and knowledge of carrier tactics.22 Having gained the advantage at Midway, dive bombers sinking four Japanese carriers, the Americans were now safe from Japanese carrier offensives and also in a position to provide carrier support for amphibious operations in the Pacific, although the Americans still had to develop an effective use of carriers for offensive operations. The Japanese were to stage renewed offensives on the Burma-India frontier and in southern China, both in 1944, and the latter with particular success; but they were no longer in a position to mount one in the Pacific. The Americans focused on island-hopping. They could decide where to attack and could neutralize bases, such as Rabaul, that they chose to leapfrog. This lessened the extent of hard, slogging conflict and thus compromised the strategic depth represented by the Japanese defensive perimeter and also helped the Americans maintain the pace of their advance. In the air war with Japan, alongside the great increase in Allied, essentially American, aeroplane numbers, there was an improvement in such spheres as ground support, while the training of large numbers of air crew was a formidable undertaking that paid off in the Pacific. There was a growing disparity in quality between American and Japanese pilots, a matter of numbers, training and flying experience, and, as a result, the Japanese could not compensate for their growing numerical inferiority in the air. At the same time, it would be foolish to neglect the extent to which the Americans benefited in the Pacific from better and more aircraft by 1943. Whereas the Japanese had not introduced new classes of planes, the Americans had done so, enabling them to challenge the Zero, which had made such an impact in the initial Japanese advances. The Corsair, Lightning and Hellcat outperformed the Zero, while, as their specifications included better protection, they were able to take more punishment than Japanese planes. The Japanese had designed the Zero with insufficient protection, in part because its light weight, increased range and manoeuvrability, but also because the safety of their pilots was a low priority. This was to culminate with kamikaze (suicide) attacks, which the Americans countered with the use of radar and by greatly increasing the anti-aircraft capability on their warships. The Americans still faced serious challenges. Prior to September 1944, in offensives in the central and south-west Pacific, they had confronted individual Japanese air bases which were isolated from outside support and overwhelmed by carrier air power. The Philippines, however, were very different. The number of air bases and feeder strips presented the Americans with an enemy land-based air power that was essentially continental in character, but American carrier-based aircraft were now clearly superior in

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quality to their land-based opposite numbers. The key naval battle of Leyte Gulf on 24–25 October involved a series of separate actions, not all of which worked out as the Americans wanted. For all the American superiority of numbers and potentially overwhelming advantage (in quality as well as quantity) in the air, it proved very difficult to control the tempo of the battle. The Americans failed to understand Japanese plans, in part due to deficiencies in reconnaissance. At the same time, Japanese operational mismanagement was serious, and the Japanese lost the battle. The contrast in resources in the closing stages of the War in the Pacific was readily apparent. Although the Japanese XIV Area Army in Luzon in early 1945 had more than a quarter of a million troops, its condition reflected the degradation of the Japanese war machine. There were only about 150 operational combat aircraft to support it, and their planes and pilots could not match the Americans in quality; most were destroyed by American carrier planes before the invasion. The Japanese troops lacked fuel and ammunition, and the relatively few vehicles available had insufficient fuel. Nevertheless, although the Americans, with Filipino support, overran the key parts of Luzon in 1944–5, they suffered over 140,000 casualties. It is also necessary to give due weight to serious policy and planning flaws in both the German and the Japanese war efforts. In part, these relate to production issues linked to industrial mobilization, but the use of military resources was also at issue. German and Japanese planning became increasingly grandiose and divorced from reality as the war progressed, with wishful thinking replacing sober calculation. Losing the intelligence war, the Germans were unable to out-think their opponents, while the Allies also proved superior in applied research. The consequences were shown in weapon procurement. One aspect was the initial failure to accept innovations in submarine design and the misplaced conviction that the existing Type VII submarine did not require improvement. Moreover, in early 1942, Admiral Raeder, the Head of the Navy, decided to meet the shortage of shipyard workers for submarine maintenance by drawing on labour engaged in the production of new submarines. As a result, a useful short-term increase in the number of operational submarines was achieved at the cost of cutting new production.23 Planning for the Luftwaffe (German air force) in 1943–4 mistakenly devoted attention to retaliation against Britain, the ‘Baby Blitz’, rather than to attacks on Soviet armament manufacture. This helped ensure that the Luftwaffe was not capable of significant counter-blows after the Allies invaded Normandy in June 1944. Furthermore, as a product of sheer desperation, Nazi fanaticism, self-serving leadership and a focus on operational issues, the Army increasingly disregarded military reality, as in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 when Allied fighting quality and responsiveness were underestimated.24 Earlier, in 1944, in responding to Operation Bagration, the German military was confounded by the speed and depth of the Soviet advance. The Germans and Japanese had had a marked advantage, in part the result of accumulated experience and acquired technique, and it took until late 1942 for the Allies to fight their enemies to a standstill. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, told a Joint Session of the US Congress on 19 May 1943, ‘The enemy is still proud and powerful…still possesses enormous armies, vast resources, and invaluable strategic territories…it is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split, that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must now reside’. Thereafter, it was a combination of superior Allied resources and technique

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that was important. They were complementary and also separate. With Soviet operations in 1944, the margin of superiority was not that marked, particularly for some offensives, but the knowledge of how to use their forces, specifically in echelon formations, was crucial. However, because there was no one-campaign end to the war, this gave the conflict an attritional character, which accorded with the authoritarian nature of the Stalinist regime and its focus on production.25 In referring to the British military, it is necessary to underline that this is taken to include dominion and imperial forces, as well as allies such as the Poles. After the unsuccessful July bomb plot of 1944, the bulk of the German military command rallied to Hitler, while Nazification was pushed by Guderian, the new Chief of the General Staff. The repression of disaffection and any sign of ‘defeatism’ by the Nazi surveillance system presided over by Heinrich Himmler helped ensure that there was no repetition of the German collapse of 1918: Allied forces were not on German soil at the Armistice then. Instead, it was a very different German regime and society that waged the Second World War until Hitler committed suicide and Berlin was captured by the Soviets. The debate over the use of the atom bombs remains a vexed one, with claims that they were used in order to make the Soviet Union more manageable in Europe and to restrict its gains in the Far East.26 Given the fighting determination and ferocity the Japanese had already displayed in defence, it is understandable that these bombs should have been used to try to ensure Japanese surrender,27 although concern about Soviet expansion may have helped lead Japan to end the war as well as the USA to be pleased that it had had an opportunity to display its nuclear capability.28 Post-war Allied occupation of Germany and Japan fully demonstrated the verdict of the struggle, repeating the fate of defeated France in 1814 and 1815. As then, regime change was a key correspondent to occupation and territorial cessions, but, after the Second World War, there was also an emphasis on structural socio-political changes. In Eastern Europe, these extended to a comprehensive demographic reordering as large numbers of people were expelled in order to create homogenous states within new boundaries. The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia and from Eastern Pomerania, Silesia and southern East Prussia, was particularly important. All of the latter had been transferred to Poland, with the accompanying population transfers resting on ethnic formulations of national identity.29 In addition, about 48 per cent of pre-war Poland was lost to the Soviet Union, an outcome rejected by the exiled Polish government. Northern East Prussia was also transferred to the Soviet Union, as was territory from Czechoslovakia and Romania. Japan lost Korea, Taiwan, South Sakhalin, the Kurile Islands and the Pacific islands it had received after the First World War. Empire fell in the German and Japanese cases as a consequence of external pressure leading to comprehensive and total military defeat. The Allied emphasis on unconditional surrender ended the option of a compromise peace and, therefore, ensured that force would be the crucial measure of power. On 18 January 1945, Churchill told the House of Commons, ‘I am clear that nothing should induce us to abandon the principle of unconditional surrender, or to enter into any form of negotiation with Germany or Japan, under whatever guise such suggestions may present themselves, until the act of unconditional surrender has been formally executed’. The British had been determined not only to keep the Soviet Union in the war but also to ensure that the USA sustained the

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peace settlement, unlike after the First World War. President Franklin D.Roosevelt, in turn, wanted to ensure that Stalin was committed, in the short term, to conflict with Japan and, in the long term, to the eventual peace settlement.30 This was seen as entailing a fundamental shift in the international system. Thus, in December 1942, Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, had told the Commons: It will be the first and imperative duty of the United Nations to establish such a settlement as will make it impossible for Germany to dominate her neighbours by force of arms. It would be sheer folly to allow some non-Nazi government to be set up and then trust to luck. The war left the USA and the Soviet Union as the dominant powers, beginning a period of acute confrontation between them. Political rivalries within eastern Europe and between the wartime Allies, stemming from the Soviet advance, fed into the Cold War.31 Planning for a new war reflected the experience of the Second World War. Considering, in May 1945, the possibility of war between the Soviet Union and an Anglo-American alliance, the British Joint Planning Staff anticipated that Soviet resilience would prevent a speedy war and that the conflict could only be waged as a total war, entailing a fully mobilized American war economy, as well as German support.32 The Americans, however, proved initially reluctant to plan for a new confrontation, let alone conflict. Soviet control of areas seized in 1944–5 was accepted, although there was an unwillingness to accept additional gains, for example in Iran. Soviet policy led to armed resistance in eastern Europe that lasted until the 1950s, although it was discouraged by a lack of appreciable Western support and failed.33

The fall of the European empires Encouraged by the Second World War, the nature and terms of external pressure came to define writing about great-power competition. This was a process carried forward during the Cold War. It was as if great powers meant total war or total confrontation, an analysis that was at once an apparently accurate reading of developments hitherto and a teleological grasping of the future. Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987, can be located very much in this context, at least insofar as the international dimension was concerned. It may, however, be asked whether the demise of the other two imperial systems discussed at the outset makes sense in terms of external pressure. Is the fall of the European colonial empires and of the Soviet Communist hegemony to be understood as a result of failure in great-power confrontations, or is there an alternative exposition? The explanation in terms of great-power confrontation would locate the fall of the European colonial empires in part as a consequence of the exhaustion produced by the Second World War. This exhaustion can be seen in several respects. In part, it is a matter of the loss of resources caused by the strain of waging the conflict, a view that seems particularly pertinent for Britain, France and the Netherlands, although not for Portugal. Until July 1944, Britain and its empire had had more divisions in fighting conflict with the enemy than the USA.

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In part, there is also an emphasis on the extent to which setbacks in the war, particularly defeats inflicted on the British and Dutch by the Japanese in 1941–2, undermined the prestige and reputation on which empire was based, and thus set in train or accelerated the pressure for non-imperial solutions. This was not simply a case of the impact in South and East Asia,34 but, instead, was one felt further afield. For example, nationalists in Kenya seeking independence from Britain kept a close eye on developments in India, although, as after the First World War, much opposition came from those who had served with the British military. The Japanese attack on China weakened the Nationalists, and Mao Zedong subsequently observed that he had to thank the Japanese for doing so.35 The failure of European empires was, in part, a product of one great-power struggle, the Second World War, which was accentuated by a second, the Cold War. The Communist powers gave active support to the anti-imperialist cause, especially in SouthEast Asia and in Africa. In Vietnam, the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War of 1946–9 was followed by an active support for the neighbouring nationalist Viet Minh in their struggle against France. In the Portuguese Empire in Africa, there was an active support for nationalist movements from both the Soviet Union and China. Far from being marginal, success in Africa in the 1970s gave many Soviets a renewed sense of pride in their own achievements and a conviction that the Soviet Union could contribute decisively to breakthroughs for Communism. Furthermore, although operating in a different fashion, the USA also helped undermine the European empires because it saw their fall as inevitable and the struggle to maintain them as conducive to the spread of Communism, as well as limiting the penetration of American commercial interests. In October 1942, Life declared ‘Of one thing we are sure. Americans are not fighting to protect the British Empire’. At the Tehran conference the following year, there were differences over the fate of European colonial empires. Roosevelt, who reflected a longstanding anti-imperialist American view and who refused to visit Britain during the war, was opposed to colonial rule and, instead, in favour of a system of ‘trusteeship’ as a prelude to independence. He pressed Churchill on the status of both Hong Kong (which he wanted returned to China) and India, and British officials were made aware of a fundamental contradiction in attitudes. Roosevelt told Churchill that the British had to adjust to a ‘new period’ in global history and to turn their back on ‘400 years of acquisitive blood in your veins’, although he did not press the point on India.36 Roosevelt mistrusted the French Empire even more than the British. The argument, for the external causes of decline as a consequence of great-power confrontations, then looks towards the claim that the Soviet empire collapsed because of its failure in the Cold War. More particularly, it is argued that the costs of military rivalry, especially in the 1980s, helped bankrupt the Soviet system, financially, economically, socially and politically. In contrast, it is suggested, the resilience of the American economy, and the ability of the Reagan government in the 1980s to use the state’s capacity to raise money in the bond market, permitted the mobilization of American resources and borrowing capability for a strong military build-up. To borrow a Marxist idea, this exposed the internal contradictions of the competing system—in this case, Communism. It is worth considering the argument in part because the fall of these empires was important in its own right, not least involving, in a relatively brief period, the shifting of

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control over a large portion of the world’s population, and in part because of a key methodological point. This is that underlining, in place of a monocasual explanation, a degree of complexity for these shifts, and for this period, serves more generally to challenge the confident clarity of systemic accounts, whether for the rise and fall of great powers or for other aspects of international relations. European retreat from empire indeed was no simple process and no automatic product of failure and defeat. Despite the importance of insurrectionary movements in sapping or destroying the practice and logic of imperial control in some colonies, it would be mistaken simply to militarize the issue and treat it largely in terms of military conflict. Instead, it is necessary to note the range of political assumptions and policies that played a part in shaping events. In particular, in both metropoles and peripheries, there was a long-standing sense of empire as a process, and not as a static reality. As such, the nature of imperial links was seen as mutable. This was accentuated because, for many regions of the world, European colonial empires were part of a sequence of imperial episodes. Thus, in northern India, British rule and dominance replaced that of the Muslim Mughals, who had invaded in the early sixteenth century. In this context, Empire, at the periphery, was always an experience of constantly shifting emphases in relationships that involved considerations of politics, economics, social interests and cultural identities. The sensitivity of imperial metropoles to this situation varied and often was not what it should be. Nevertheless, alongside an aspiration for a fixed imperial dominance that would lead to great-power status, there was also a sense of changing imperial responsibilities and relationships. Empire, in a European tradition that looked back to a norm-creating presentation of the example of Rome, was seen as a civilizing process in which those ruled would be raised to a higher standard. The causes and process were believed to vary, with differing emphases on religious prosleytism, education, economic advance, social amelioration and political progress, but there was a sense of transition for elites, people and political structures. This sense entailed not the ending of empire but its transition into a differing practice that was more federal. In the British Empire, this owed much to support both for the effective federalism of the dominion system and for a range of practices, such as protectorates, that left existing, non-Western authorities in place. Against this background, it is possible to look at some aspects of metropolitan attitudes and policies in the post-1945 situation in terms of accelerated changes rather than as the breakdown of empire. Indeed, imperial powers hoped to manage transition in order to keep themselves powerful. This can be seen in the case of Britain. During the Second World War, Churchill’s determination to save the empire was directed at the USA and the Soviet Union as well as Germany and Japan. In March 1944, he wrote to Roosevelt: Thank you very much for your assurances about no sheep’s eyes at our oil fields in Iran and Iraq. Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurances that we have no thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi Arabia… Great Britain seeks no advantage, territorial or otherwise, as the result of the war. On the other hand she will not be deprived of anything which rightly belongs to her.37

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In the late 1940s, the Labour government that gave India independence in 1947 still hoped that an independent India would be willing to cooperate militarily with Britain, both in the Middle East and against the Soviet Union and thus compensate for the loss of the Indian army, which had been the major source of British imperial manpower. The Commonwealth, the group of Britain and now independent parts of the former empire, was also seen as a way to manage and ensure the maintenance of influence. Although the French were reasonably successful in continuing a degree of control after formally providing independence to most of their African colonies in 1960, such hopes proved largely unfounded, especially in the case of the Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese empires and also for much of the British Empire. Military and political relations with the former empire changed, as in 1957 when the British handed over their remaining bases in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in response to nationalist pressure and after the use of these bases had been blocked by the government of Ceylon during the Suez Crisis of the previous year. However, these hopes provide an important indication of the variety of views about imperial development in the metropole and of the danger of simply treating the issue in a reductionist fashion and neglecting the role of ideas. After the burst of French (Syria and Lebanon), American (Philippines), British (India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Palestine) and Dutch (Indonesia) decolonization in the second half of the 1940s, there was, in the early and mid-1950s, a determined attempt to maintain imperial power, not least in Eastern Europe where Soviet imperial control was enforced by a large-scale invasion of Hungary in 1956. Although Britain and France had reduced their global commitments, they were ready to fight for what remained, while, at the same time, trying to move their colonies towards a form of self-government. This entailed a rethinking of the alliances on which empires were based. In assessing the warfare for continuing empire, it is pertinent to consider the extent to which the struggles were determined by external great-power considerations, particularly the attitude of the USA, and also to ask whether these struggles were themselves measures of great-power strength. For Britain and France, empire, however it was defined in governmental terms on the ground, was, it was thought, a guarantee of greatpower status, not least because it would command the respect of others.38 As a result, sustaining empire, it was believed, would maintain this status, not least because of the impact on others of being able and willing to maintain the effort. This ability was, in part, a matter of resources, but will was also seen as a key element of this ability. Moreover, the will to empire and power was regarded as crucial in providing appropriate goals for democratic societies in the metropoles that might otherwise focus on their own material comfort. Vitalist notions of national strength thus played a continuing role in the quest for power. For the imperial powers, counter-insurgency policies posed the problem of maintaining support, both in the metropoles and in the colonies, for imperial rule, as a key aspect of defeating insurrectionary forces. This did not prove an easy equation, but, instead, interacted with divisions in the metro-poles over the goals that should be followed. There was opposition to the maintenance of imperial control, which, in part, responded to the emergence of the principle of racial equality as well as of democratic nationalist movements in the colonies; but also opposition, from other political constituencies, to concessions to those seeking independence.

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The complexity of goals created serious strategic, operational and tactical issues for the colonial powers. In particular, there was the problem of isolating and crushing rebels while winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the colonial population, the latter an objective thrown into prominence by the extent to which insurgencies sapped the consent on which imperial rule rested. In turn, the insurgents had, at least in theory, a simple strategy. They sought to wear out the imperial power and its supporters in the metropoles and the colonies and to make the price of continued imperial rule too high to pay. In operational terms, there was also a rivalry between the conventional forces and tactics of the imperial powers and the irregular forces and guerrilla tactics of their opponents. Indeed, there was a high level of asymmetry in the warfare, not least in the use of massive firepower, including air-power, against scattered targets. However, during the Cold War, guerrillas benefited from the supply of improved weaponry by the major powers.39 The biggest effort to maintain imperial power in the 1950s was made by France, first in Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and then in Algeria. Despite their superior weaponry, the poorly commanded French finally proved unable to defeat their opponents in Indo-China in either guerrilla or conventional warfare. This sapped support back in France and also challenged France’s ability to maintain local support. Defeat of a French force at Dien Bien Phu proved decisive in the trial of will. Despite still holding all the key points, the French abandoned Indo-China in 1954. American concern about the consequences for the advance of Communism in South-East Asia sowed the seed for the subsequent Vietnam War.40 In Algeria, resources were also not the crucial element. The French were able to deploy large numbers of troops, after first reservists and then conscripts were sent. The dispatch of both these groups, however, was unpopular and, from 1957, greatly increased opposition to the conflict within France. Algeria, which, constitutionally, was part of France rather than a colony, was dominated by a settler population (colons) of over 1 million, and the 8.5 million native Muslims had no real power and suffered discrimination. This was not the best basis for anchoring French rule. The subsequent struggle indicated that industrial capacity was not the key to victory. The terror operations by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) destabilized the French relationship with the indigenous Muslims: loyalists were killed, while the French found it difficult to identify their opponents and alienated Muslims by ruthless search-and-destroy operations; relations between colons and Muslims also deteriorated. In 1955, the scale of FLN operations increased, and the war hotted up with massacres, reprisals and a commitment by the French to a more rigorous approach. This also led to more effective French tactics. Static garrisons were complemented by pursuit groups, often moved by helicopter. The struggle also suggested, however, that a military solution was difficult once an insurrection had begun. In this, the Algerian war prefigured that in Vietnam involving the Americans. The FLN was badly damaged in 1959, just as the Viet Cong was to be in 1968, but the continued existence of both created pressure in the metropole for a political solution. As a result, the struggle in Algeria became closely involved with political tensions within the French side. This is more generally true of many conflicts (and not simply counter-insurgency ones), undermining their value for ‘realist’ analysis of the strength of particular powers. The pressures of international opinion over Algeria were also significant as they made the French position seem tentative.41

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The Algerian War, moreover, illustrated the general difficulty of counter-insurgency, at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Tough measures, including torture, which was seen as a response to FLN atrocities, gave the French control of the city of Algiers in 1957. However, although undefeated in battle, the French were unable to end guerrilla action in what was a very costly struggle. And French moves were often counterproductive in winning the loyalty of the bulk of the population. Aside from the difficulty of operating active counter-insurgency policies, there was also a need to tie up large numbers of troops in protecting settlers and in trying to close the frontiers to guerrilla reinforcements.42 It is very easy to see France’s failure as one of a power that lacked the resources for greatness, with the situation exposed by strategic overreach and, more specifically, as a failure of imperial counter-insurgency, but it is important also to understand the degree to which counter-insurgency was a more widespread problem facing states, and, moreover, one that continues. For example, after independence, FLN-ruled Algeria also failed to preserve peace, as it was unable to meet popular expectations and was perceived as corrupt. From 1992, Algeria returned to civil war, as the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists of the Front Islamique du Salut destabilized the state by wide-spread and brutal terror. In turn, the Government adopted the earlier techniques of the French, including helicopterborne pursuit groups, large-scale sweep-and-search operations and the use of terror as a reprisal. It is, therefore, misleading to see great or major powers as inherently weak or to present Western military and political structures and methods as necessarily at fault in the failures of counter-insurgency operations in the 1950s and 1960s. This is not least the case because there were successes, as with the British suppression of Communist opposition in Malaya and of the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. In each, after initial problems, the British benefited from a mixture of gaining the initiative militarily with active social policies that restricted opposition support.43 The British, however, were far less successful in Aden (South Yemen). The scorched-earth tactics and the resettlement policies seen in Malaya in the 1950s were used, but the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front forced an abandonment of the interior in 1967. Reduced to holding on to the city of Aden, a base area that had also to be defended from internal disaffection and where the garrison itself had to be protected, the sole initiative left was to abandon the position, which was done in November 1967.44 Problems on the periphery were accentuated by diplomatic pressure for change, not least the views of the USA, Britain’s major ally. Under President Harry S.Truman, US policy became anti-Communist, but an anti-imperial dimension remained. These points need to be borne in mind when considering the argument that the financial problems arising from relative economic decline and from social-welfare commitments were responsible for the abandonment of empire. Tensions between Britain and the USA focused on the 1956 Suez Crisis when Britain, France and Israel sought to use force to deal with nationalist opposition in the Arab world. This attempt failed for a number of reasons, but American hostility, manifested in an unwillingness to provide economic and financial support, was crucial.45 It followed on American backing for Egypt in its 1954 treaty with Britain, which had led to the withdrawal of the British garrison from the Suez Canal. The collapse of the Anglo-French effort in 1956 thus marked a key moment in public recognition of American power, not least because it occurred in a region that had

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been very much part of the British sphere of activity during the Second World War. The dispatch of American forces to the former French colony of Lebanon in 1958 was another regional assertion of American power, although the British took action in stabilizing Jordan in 1958 and in helping deter Iraq from attacking Kuwait in 1961. From the Suez Crisis flowed both a decline in British self-confidence, shown in policy terms such as rapid decolonization from 1957 and the attempts in the 1960s to join the European Economic Community and a more profound sense of British decline. The fictional Milton Krest in Ian Fleming’s short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, tells James Bond ‘Nowadays there were only three powers—America, Russia and China…no other country had either the chips or the cards to come into it’.46 In June 1961, the American and Soviet leaders met in Vienna, the first of the summits attended only by the superpowers and not by the old European colonial powers. By then, France had given independence to most of its African empire and Belgium to the Congo. With its Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, discerning a ‘wind of change in Africa’, Britain was moving to a post-colonial future. The Government was still hopeful that the Common-wealth might enable Britain to maintain a widespread international influence, but these hopes proved deceptive.

The Cold War and the Third World The leading Western power, the USA, confronted its own challenge in Vietnam, which had been partitioned after the withdrawal of the French in 1954. The Communists controlled the North, and an American-supported government was established in South Vietnam. In the face of Communist insurgency supported from North Vietnam, and concerned that failure would lead to strategic crisis in the shape of the further spread of Communism—the domino theory, Presidents Kennedy (1961–3) and Johnson (1963–9) Americanized the war, committing troops to reach a peak of 541,000 in January 1969. American strategy, however, was wrongly based on the assumption that unacceptable losses could be inflicted on the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies in the South; instead, the coercive political system of the North Vietnamese gave individuals no choice in the matter. Indeed, the Americans cracked first, after an inability to secure victory had resulted in an attrition that produced an apparent stalemate. The racially suffused sense of cultural superiority over the Vietnamese that had helped lead to an assumption of the necessity for American leadership proved misplaced.47 Looked at differently, and underlining the complexity of the situation, and the need for caution in analysis, the Americans came to appreciate the consequences of limited war, namely that it could lead to failure. In part, the prospects for limited warfare depended on the contrast of relative strength. Although the USA only sent 23,000 troops into the Dominican Republic in the West Indies in 1965, in order to thwart a left-wing movement from seizing power to reverse a coup of two years earlier, this action was more successful, in part because it was possible to secure a local compromise,48 than the commitment of far larger numbers of troops to Vietnam. There, the goals of a limitation in military presence and a successful outcome proved impossible. Subsequent debate as to whether total war, which, with the technology of the period, might have stretched from unlimited bombing to the use of nuclear weapons, would have

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led to American victory, can only go so far, as the intention was not to fight such a war, not least due to concern that it might lead the Chinese and Soviets to move from the provision of aid to the North Vietnamese to full-scale action in the region or more widely. The highly damaging (and unexpected) consequences for American forces of Chinese intervention in the Korean War in 1950 appeared a sobering example. Alongside a hope that the Soviet Union might broker an end to the Vietnam War, vulnerability to Soviet pressure in Europe and the Middle East was also an issue, not least because the USA wished to avoid nuclear war. Instead, as with British planning against Germany in 1939–40, there was an emphasis in American policy in the Cold War on containment, economic warfare, intervention in secondary theatres and an avoidance of any full-scale main-force conflict. It was hoped that this combination would bring victory in the long term. Thus, as far as the Vietnam War was concerned, it was necessary to appreciate the need to be prepared to lose a war rather than escalate it to a point where it might spread and become something more than limited. That the conflict was not worth winning, or accepting heavy casualties for, also became a view held by much of the electorate.49 Furthermore, in the wider strategic sense, the concerns that had helped lead to American intervention had been assuaged. Far from the fall of South Vietnam leading to the collapse of the pro-Western position throughout South-East Asia, it had only extended to Cambodia and Laos, both of which had been drawn into the Vietnam War as the result of the North Vietnamese use of their territory in order to support the war in the south, and American interventions in response. In contrast, Thailand, an important American ally which was to become a significant economic power, had not fallen. Furthermore, in Indonesia, the shattering in 1965 by the local military with GIA encouragement of the Indonesian Communist movement, with over half a million slaughtered, gave key strategic depth to containment. In the aftermath, the pro-American military took control of the state, the fourth most populous in the world. In the early 1970s, moreover, President Richard Nixon exploited growing rivalry between China and the Soviet Union, a rivalry that in part reflected the long-standing Soviet failure to treat the Chinese Communists as equals. Instead, Stalin had both regarded China as of relatively little consequence compared to Europe and had treated Mao Zedong as a client, including after the success of the latter in the Chinese Civil War (1946–9). Mao Zedong, in turn, came to see better relations with the USA as a way to secure China’s status as a great power. Sino-Soviet rivalry led not only to closer relations between the USA and China, which was a major strategic advantage for both as it was seen as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. This rivalry also led, by 1978–9, to warfare between China and Vietnam, which was pro-Soviet. Alongside large-scale conflict involving the regular forces of Western powers, there was also warfare at the interface between the Cold War and guerrilla struggles in which the role of the major powers was more indirect. In part, this was a matter of the use of proxies, as with the Soviet Union’s deployment from the 1970s of Cuban forces in antiWestern causes in Africa, and the American use in the 1980s of Contras to destabilize the left-wing Sandinista government of Nicaragua in Central America. In part, this use of proxies extended to a fracturing of the Cold War, leading to confused struggles, which encompassed, for example, rivalry between Chinese-backed and Soviet-backed guerrilla forces in southern Africa.

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The military analysis of these struggles, which became important in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Africa and in Latin America, is complex, not least because of the limited amount of detailed research on some of these conflicts and the related difficulty of assessing effectiveness. The most important conclusion relates to the absence of any separate civilian and military spheres. This ensured not only a high level of anti-societal violence, as with terrorism and massacres, but also the difficulty of grounding any ‘military’ verdict in terms of the consent of the defeated. As a consequence, the continued supply to the combatants of arms, money and support by outside powers proved important. Thus, in Sudan, the Government received Soviet weapons and advisers and also support from Egypt, in its conflict with black, non-Islamic southern separatists who, in the 1960s, were supported by Israel. When outside supply ended, these struggles often became less bitter, which reflected the importance of the wider context. This was noticeable in Central America and Angola with the end of the Cold War, although, as in Angola, this end did not necessarily mean the coming of peace, which only came when the leader of the UNITA movement was killed. Earlier, the struggles had reflected the changing chronology of the Cold War. From the mid-1960s, for example, it was clear to both Moscow and Washington that the focus for Cold War competition in Africa was shifting from north and central to southern Africa, in part because of the Marxist slant of many of that region’s liberation movements.50 The Americans took a major role in a number of proxy struggles. At the outset, the most important was in the Philippines where the conservative government failed in 1946–7 to defeat an insurrection by the Communist-led Hukbalahap movement. From 1948, the US-run Joint Military Advisory Group began to receive more American military assistance, and, from 1950, this gathered pace in response to Communist victory in China and the outbreak of the Korean War, both of which increased American sensitivity in the Asia-Pacific region. The Americans financed and equipped the Philippines Army so that it was able to take the war to the Huks, and this was powerfully supported by a policy of land reform. The rebellion ended in 1954. The Philippines, like Latin America, was part of what many American policy-makers saw as the informal American empire, and this encouraged intervention. In the case of Latin America, a direct or proxy role in domestic conflicts was also long-standing and, in the first half of the century, had become a pronounced aspect of a policy that was at once military, diplomatic and economic. During the Cold War, this was accentuated by concern about the alleged Communist leanings of populist regimes. Thus, the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, with its commitment to land reform, was seen as proCommunist and this led, in 1954, to opposition organized, funded, armed and trained by the GIA, culminating in an invasion of these troops from Honduras, eventually supported by American aircraft. Under this pressure, the Government was deposed by the Army, and a military dictatorship created. A poorly planned attempt to overthrow the left-wing government, however, was unsuccessful in Cuba in 1961, in large part because the CIAarmed exiles were ineffective in the absence of support within Cuba. The American decision not to provide air support was also significant to the exiles’ failure while Fidel Castro responded to the crisis with vigour. In Brazil in 1964, when the army seized power with American encouragement, launching a dictatorship that lasted until 1985, this coup did not require American military support, but its result was welcomed by them. In 1967,

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the Americans also helped Bolivia suppress Che Guevara’s attempt to stage a Communist insurrection among the Bolivian peasantry. Outside their informal empires, Western policy-makers felt pressed to intervene by what were seen as political vacuums opening up as a result of the collapse of European imperialism. This pressure owed much to American distrust of Third World popular nationalist movements, which were seen as likely to be crypto-Communist, when, in practice, American policy frequently helped to accentuate a tendency to turn to the Soviets. In Africa, this was first seen in Congo, which became independent from Belgium in 1960, with the USA hostile to the Congolese National Movement headed by the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. A nationalist, he was seen by the USA as pro-Soviet, and the USA had sought to prevent his election. Comprising many ethnic groups and lacking a practice of united central government under African control, Congo fragmented with strong currents of regional separatism, especially in mineral-rich Katanga. Lumumba sought United Nations support, but the fear that he might turn to the Soviet Union led the American Government to consider intervention, including a coup and the assassination of Lumumba. The Congolese military, under the kleptomaniac psychopath General Joseph Mobutu, seized power in September 1960, and Lumumba was murdered soon after. The Americans provided military assistance to Mobutu, although his vicious policies led to opposition in Congo. As President Johnson did not want to intervene with American troops, the GIA paid for and organized a campaign against the rebels in eastern Congo in 1964–5, with GIA aircraft being particularly important. Waged by Western mercenaries and Mobutu’s troops, this campaign enforced a very brutal settlement. The former colonial power, Belgium, also provided help to Mobutu’s dictatorship. America’s proxies in Africa included Congo and South Africa in the case of Angola from 1975, as efforts were made to prevent the establishment of a left-wing government, which, in turn, received Cuban support.51 In South Asia, the USA relied on Iran, using it both to support the Kurds against Iraq in the 1970s and, in 1973, to send troops to help the Sultan of Oman defeat his left-wing opponents. Britain also sent troops to Oman, which had been a protectorate. Struggles in the Third World, whether of decolonization or as part of the Cold War, however, cannot be treated simply in terms of conflict between the great powers. This approach was very much one taken by the protagonists in the Cold War, but it neglected the autonomous character of developments.

The rise of the American Empire At the same time, the fall of empires was scarcely the sole theme in this period, as that leaves out the rise of that of the USA. This was the main beneficiary of the fall of the Japanese and Western colonial empires, even though that fall was not the cause of the rise of American power. If American strategic overreach could be readily detected by commentators, whether discussing the Korean War (1950–3), the Vietnam War, or the situation in the 1980s, that overreach was, in part, a product of commitments arising from the problems of other powers. These commitments were not simply military and political. Indeed, there was a deliberate attempt to recreate international free trade and capital markets as an aspect and adjunct both of American power and of a world that would be amenable to American goals. Under the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, American-

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supported monetary agencies—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (each of which had American headquarters)—were established in order to play an active role in strengthening the global financial system and thus appropriate economic and security arrangements. The Americans did not want a return to the beggar-my-neighbour devaluations of the 1930s. Partly as a result, the Marshall Plan, a large-scale reconstruction scheme, was launched in order to ensure a market-based economy in Europe. This was encouraged when the Plan led to the European Payments Union, which further encouraged the ready convertibility of currency, as well as liberalizing trade.52 The cause of free trade, a mode of informal empire first for Britain and later for the USA, was taken forward as America backed decolonization by the European empires and, also, the creation of independent capitalist states, including Japan and what became West Germany. These were seen as likely to look to the USA for leadership, an assessment that on the whole proved correct. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947, began a major cut in tariffs that slowly re-established free trade and helped it to boom. Furthermore, the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency in a fixed exchange-rate system ensured that many commodity prices (including of oil), much of international trade, foreign-exchange liquidity and financial assets were denominated in US currency. The combination of American economic strength and the devastation of industries elsewhere ensured that in September 1945 the USA accounted for about three-quarters of world production, an anomalous situation. Soft power was also an expression and cause of American strength, replicating the appeal of Britain in the nineteenth century as a model of progress but doing so in a fashion that was more broadly rooted socially. This was because the American model came to play a crucial role in the West at a time when new identities were expressed in an energetic consumerism, while the American government actively sponsored a reshaping of other countries in its own image of the USA because it saw this as the way to ensure their support. This reshaping involved a measure of interventionism, including the funding of sympathetic groups and the encouragement of anti-Communist measures. In Western Europe, this included support for political and economic integration. International influence was understood in part in terms of an alliance system of democracies, a situation that, the Americans expected, was to be spread by the dismantling of colonial empires. The social basis of rule in democracies was certainly far wider than in the post-war European colonial empires. Their reliance, for example, that by the British in the Persian Gulf and the Aden Protectorate, on traditional elites ensured a serious vulnerability in the face of social change and also made the Arab nationalism and internationalism advocated by President Nasser of Egypt appear a major threat. Meanwhile, the USA became a society of mass affluence, which helped to make it more generally attractive, not least as Hollywood and the television spread positive images of American life, taking forward, and more intensively and successfully, earlier positive images of the USA that owed much to the appeal of American cultural products.53 On 15 May 1950, the cover of the leading news magazine Time showed a globe with facial features eagerly drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola, with the caption ‘World and Friend. Love that piaster, that lira, that tickery, and that American way of life’. American culture was seductive. It seemed fresh, vital, optimistic and democratic, certainly compared to the war-scarred and exhausted societies of Europe. As Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, pointed out, ‘Europe is no longer the centre of world

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affairs’. With the political cultures of Western Europe weakened, or discredited, by defeat, collaboration or exhaustion, and struggling to recover, their societies, especially that of West Germany (part of which was occupied by American forces), were reshaped in response to American influences and consumerism, which were associated with the attractions of prosperity, youth, fashion, glamour and sex appeal.54 American culture also replaced European models elsewhere, particularly in Canada, Australia and Latin America, and was influential in Japan, which the Americans occupied. This culture was especially attuned to the worlds of television, the car and suburbia, which were increasingly influential from the 1950s, but more than consumerism was involved. There was also a cultural content that was more democratic, accessible and populist than that elsewhere. For example, composers such as Barber, Bernstein, Copeland, Gershwin and Ives created a musical language that successfully and vibrantly spanned classical and popular idioms and drew heavily on the latter. Rock ensured that the USA made a powerful impact on popular music in the 1950s. American culture also had a powerful utilitarian chord, one driven not only by a consumerism attracted to the possibilities of the new but also by the opportunities provided by big science which American government and public culture embraced with important economic and strategic consequences. The USA itself changed profoundly, with a major geographical shift in the pattern of American life that had long-term consequences for the focus of American concerns, an apt reminder of the mutability of strategic cultures. In the late nineteenth century, the country had been dominated economically by a portion of the eastern seaboard— essentially from Baltimore to Boston, and the abutting area west to Chicago, Milwaukee and St Louis. Aside from financial and corporate dominance, this was also the region of large-scale manufacturing activity and of much of the population. Given the modest range of federal government activities, the remainder of the USA was essentially selfgoverning, through largely autonomous states, but, nevertheless, there was a feeling in the South and West that the East dominated them economically, financially and politically, and sought to do so culturally. There were major changes in the mid-twentieth century. With a large-scale expansion of the economy of the Pacific states,55 wartime industrial activity shifted the balance of economic activity, and the USA was transformed from an Atlantic state with a continental hinterland into a continental power with two oceans. The south and west also became more important in economic and demographic terms during the post-war ‘baby boom’, a period of rapid population growth. Culturally, a shift to the mid-west and the Pacific coast challenged the influence of the north-east, and, from the 1960s, the legacy of the Civil War was finally overcome. Far from being a simple monolith, and thus to be understood as a unit in power relations, the USA itself altered just as its relationship with the wider world changed. In the 1950s, the identity of the USA, nevertheless, seemed reasonably clear. The cultural appeal of post-war America interacted with its role as the leader and defender of the free world (despite concern about the position of African-Americans), and both drew heavily on the country’s economic and financial strength. American power was ardently sought, keenly wished for, or at least reluctantly embraced, around much of the world. In Western Europe, it was a case of invited empire, although French consent was limited, while the hard-left was opposed. More generally, the USA was correctly seen as crucial

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to the ‘long peace’, to the security of Western Europe and Japan, and to the survival, as independent states, of Israel, South Korea, Taiwan and, later, Kuwait. How best to enlist American support was a central goal for many politicians, particularly in the establishment and maintenance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an alliance established in 1949 that also drew on American cultural power. NATO, and more particularly the presence of American troops after the post-war occupation ceased in 1955, solved the German problem56 without other Western European powers having to accept German ideas, such as an atomic capability, let alone the highly dubious security of greater Soviet strength. In 1963, West Germany agreed to remain without nuclear forces in return for an American security guarantee. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 saw unsuccessful earlier calls by conservative American interventionists for action to stop the Communist advance during the Chinese Civil War (1946–9) brought to a different fruition as President Harry S.Truman acted to stop such a Communist invasion of South Korea.57 This encouraged a reversal of the massive post-1945 demobilization and a militarization in America’s attitude to international alliances, with, for example, expenditure more closely geared to military goals. These alliances, however, were put under pressure by differing views both over the degree to which expenditure on defence should be emphasized at the expense of social welfare and because of tensions over alliance goals. This was not simply a matter of the USA doing too much, and worrying and angering allies accordingly, although that could be a factor. However, part of the reason for concern, even anger, over American policy in particular junctures stemmed not only from disagreements over choices between competing priorities for America (and her allies), but also from a strong sense of disappointment about tasks mishandled or not attempted. Hopes focused on the USA proved deceptive. In part, the failings were those of American policy-makers and national priorities, not least the (domestic) politics of American power, but they arose even more from a failure, both in the USA and abroad, to accept that only so much could be achieved. The strategic policies and strategic cultural assumptions of the great powers of the period were also as much to do with domestic as with international challenges and issues. The notion of the enemy within, or the danger of weakness within, was not a new one, although it was not a constant one. In Europe, it had owed much to religious rivalry from the 1520s to the 1680s and to ideological tensions in the 1790s, and was less pronounced in the intervening period. From 1917, in response to the rise of Communism (accentuated, in the case of Germany, by the stab-in-the-back explanation of defeat in the First World War fervently advanced by nationalists), this sense of ideological conflict had revived markedly and it could lead to a high degree of civil control. The obvious manifestation was the large-scale imprisonment of class enemies in the labour camps of the Soviet Union. The Cold War, in turn, saw a high level of ideological confrontation between Communism and conservatism, and this fed anxiety about domestic criticism, an anxiety that also owed much to the belief in the danger posed by ‘fifth columns’ of secret opponents, not least in the event of wartime. In the case of the West in the 1950s, there was concern about the ideological and practical challenge of the left and its admiration for the Soviet Union. This shared concern helped in the spread of American ‘soft power’. American soft power, in part, rested on the hard power of victory in 1945, a victory that left the USA in occupation of Japan and parts of Germany and Austria, as well as the

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leading military power at sea and in the air, but, in large part, the key issue was how this power was to be used. The political structure, political culture and politics of the defeated states was transformed with, in particular, nationalist and authoritarian right-wing movements remodelled as pro-capitalist and pro-American democratic parties. These parties then became the key element in government as independence was re-established. The Americans helped in the strengthening of pro-Western and non-, if not anti-, Communist parties, while the social revolution put in place in western Europe, which was primarily social democratic in origin, in the decade after 1945 was underwritten by American funding. In West Germany, there was also a deliberate fostering of unions as a means of countering Communist influence. Soft power, like its hard counterpart, is not, however, a fixed entity, but, instead, is affected by shifting nuances and unstable contexts. In part, a change to the Americandominated post-war order in the non-Communist world was to be expected, as America’s relative economic position in 1945 was an aberrant consequence of wartime devastation. The recovery of Europe and Japan naturally led to a reduction of American power in relative terms, and the mishandling of the American economy in the 1960s, specifically in seeking to borrow heavily for Vietnam and the ‘Great Society’ programme of social improvement, rather than to cover more of the expenditure by taxation, was in no small measure the cause of many of the problems the USA faced in the 1970s. This change was accentuated in the late 1960s, not simply by the general cultural movement of those years but also because the Vietnam War led eventually to a serious domestic and international loss of confidence in the purpose of American power. Antiwar sentiment in the USA and further afield contributed to a widespread critique of the USA. This critique serves as a reminder of the psychological dimensions of the notion of strategic overreach. The Vietnam War also demonstrated that being the leading world power did not necessarily mean that less powerful states could be defeated. In part, this was because power does not entail effectiveness and in part because its application is conditioned by wider political circumstances. In the case of the Vietnam War, these included the American determination to avoid broadening the struggle into the Third World War, and also the extent to which the conflict was an Asian civil war, the course of which the USA could not control. This was a more profound reason for American failure in Vietnam than the growing financial and economic problems that affected the USA in the late 1960s, although these were serious. In Vietnam, the American military could only provide more of the same and not a recasting of policy. Vietnam proved what was obvious and unappreciated, that there were always limits to national power and competence. The American military was also unfortunate in that in Vietnam it had no recent experience of serious failure on which to draw, in part because it had been possible to contain the Chinese intervention in the Korean War. The American military had no experience of fighting defensively on its own soil and having to improvise or recast itself in the midst of defeat and failure. It had had its share of defeats, particularly in the initial Pacific stages of the Second World War, but, for the most part, had been able to wage war on the basis of the choice granted by strategic inviolability and to wage war in strength and with success. Korea could be discounted as ‘special circumstances’. Throughout the Vietnam War, the response of the American military to failure was to seek to pursue to success the method that it brought to the conflict.58

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It is also pertinent to note that the politics of concern, inside and outside the USA, about American policy were not dependent on economic changes. Instead, they reflected the autonomous role of political developments. Thus, the sense of defeat and division that the Vietnam War provoked had a major impact on American society and politics. It also led to a significant rethinking of the political context of force projection and one that serves as a reminder that such contexts are not fixed either within or between states. The War Powers Resolution, passed in November 1973, by a Democrat-dominated Congress over President Richard Nixon’s veto, stipulated consultation with Congress before American forces were sent into conflict, and a system of regular presidential report and congressional authorization thereafter. The law was to be evaded by successive presidents and was not to be enforced by Congress, but it symbolized a post-Vietnam restraint that discouraged military interventionism in the 1970s and helped to ensure that, in the 1980s, the more bellicose anti-Communist Reagan administration still did not commit ground forces in El Salvador or Nicaragua, let alone Angola. Paul Kennedy placed considerable emphasis on American economic and fiscal problems in the 1980s, prefiguring the conclusion reached in 1992 by James Carville, Bill Clinton’s successful campaign strategist, ‘It’s the economy stupid!’ As so often, problems reflected both absolute and relative factors. Within the USA, inflationary pressures owed much to the decision to pay for the Vietnam War and the ‘Great Society’ programme of social improvement by borrowing, rather than taxation. Loose money policies led to an inflation that spread through the global economy. In addition, it was, in any case, increasingly difficult to control financial flows in what had become a far larger world economy. Whereas liquidity had been restricted to the USA in 1945, and the American Government had then extended it to other governments, especially as Marshall Aid, by the late 1960s liquidity was widely distributed and therefore difficult to control, while balance of payments deficits contributed to a fall in American gold reserves. The USA, like Britain, also found that these deficits were exacerbated by the need to support their NATO contingents on the front line of the Cold War in West Germany. As a result of this factor, as well as of manpower shortages and of France leaving NATO’s military command structure, both the USA and Britain made efforts to shift an increasing part of the burden onto West Germany.59 As with the attempt of the British Government in the 1760s to make the North American colonies pay towards the cost of imperial defence, these efforts reflected both a fiscal basis of policy but also the extent to which issues of appropriate policy had an autonomous role. Such issues, indeed, were important to all alliances. As far as the fiscal dimension was concerned, policy was, in part, a matter of politicized choices. For example, employing Keynesian demand management, the USA, under both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, was more prepared to tolerate inflation and price pressures than Germany and Japan. The different levels of inflation in particular economies made it very difficult to manage the international economy and exchange rates, and eventually shattered the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates: in 1971, Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, allowing the dollar to fall. The relative position of the USA was also affected by different growth rates. They were higher in Western Europe and Japan, in part as a consequence of the recovery from wartime damage and in part the possibility of making rapid advances by introducing

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American techniques. Moreover, it proved difficult to sustain earlier rates of American innovation and productivity growth, while, as a result of rapid German and Japanese economic development, the USA faced increasing problems, first in some export markets and then in the domestic market. Much of the American economy was dominated by large corporations closely linked to major trade unions in a corporatist system in which the unions were bought off and increased costs passed to consumers. Innovation was stymied, not least because there was no wish to change working rules that would upset the unions. In contrast, the Japanese were far more innovative on the production line. In 1971, helped by rising oil imports, the USA ran its first trade deficit of the century, and this greatly hit confidence in economic management, and thus in the dollar. The American system had been based upon surpluses and investment abroad. Difficulties were turned into crisis in 1973 when the major oil producers in the Middle East grouped in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), pushed up the price of oil dramatically. The leaderships of these states were angry at American support for Israel, specifically during its, eventually successful, war with Egypt and Syria that October, but also keen to exploit growing world dependence on oil. In part, there had also been an intention to begin a war and then to use the oil issue to provoke intervention that would force Israel to terms. Moreover, the price per barrel, 3 in 1972, was, in real terms, less than the price in 1946, and American inflation was further eroding its real value. The price rose to 12 at the close of 1974. This hit oil importers and fuelled inflation, damaging economic confidence. The prosperity, and thus politics, of the USA ultimately depended on unfettered access to large quantities of inexpensive oil. The price of oil was raised again in 1979, from 14 to 25 a barrel in six months, as a consequence of the successful Islamic fundamentalist revolution against the Shah of Iran, a crucial American ally.60 Issues of investment opportunity and confidence, however, ensured that much of the OPEC money was recycled back into the USA, a practice that acts as a qualification of notions of American weakness. From the 1970s, the greater profits enjoyed by oilproducing states, especially Saudi Arabia, the leading producer, were invested in the USA, a crucial aspect of the relationship between the two economies and states. Petrodollars thus became a measure of American influence. Similarly, the beneficiaries of East Asian economic growth, particularly Japan, invested in the USA, thus helping the Americans to finance imports from East Asia. The inflow of foreign capital was encouraged with the ending in 1984 of the withholding tax on interest on income paid to non-residents. This inflow led to the large-scale purchase of treasury bonds, which reduced bond yields and ensured that the federal government could borrow in order to cover expenditure. Moreover, attractive interest rates in the 1980s kept the demand for the dollar strong in foreign-exchange markets. Power has to be judged in relative terms. If the USA was hit by problems, so also were other states, especially in Europe. Furthermore, Japan, which proved able to cope with the oil-price crisis, remained closely tied to the USA for geopolitical, military, economic and fiscal reasons, ties that were important to what has been termed the Asian American century.61 Having passed Britain, West Germany and France in GNP in the 1960s, Japan became the second wealthiest country in the world (after the USA). The buoyancy of the Japanese economy enabled it to fund significant overseas investment, and this contributed to the increased fluidity of financial flows.

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The revival of world growth after the 1970s crisis, especially in countries that were able to contain labour inflation, raise productivity and move into new areas of demand, helped the American economy in the 1980s. Coupled with the ability to borrow, economic recovery underwrote a more assertive American stance; although the role of attitudes, specifically those of the Reagan presidency, was also important.62 Far from being cowed by Soviet military developments, not least the creation of a major naval capability, the American government and military responded with higher expenditure and a vigorous determination to develop doctrines that would enable an aggressive response, on land, sea and air, to any Soviet attack. In practice, even before Reagan, the Carter administration had taken a more assertive stance, as well as enhancing American military and intelligence preparedness. The overthrow of the Shah led, in early 1980, to the Carter Doctrine for the defence of the Persian Gulf and to the establishment of the Rapid Deployment Task Force, which was to become the basis of Central Command. This task force was presented as a body able to provide a rapid response across the world, although Carter’s earlier cuts in military expenditure helped ensure that the Carter Doctrine could not have been fulfilled if necessary. The potential challenge, however, was lessened when Saddam Hussein of Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, ensuring that the latter seemed a far less serious threat to America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. This war lasted until 1988, with the West providing indirect support to Iraq, not least by protecting tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf from Iranian attack. The military situation was transformed under Ronald Reagan due to the extensive build-up of American support. Combined with the end of the Cold War, this helped make it possible to mount a strong response when Saddam, seeking an opportunistic victory that would win prestige and finance, conquered oil-rich Kuwait in 1990. Earlier, a vigorous American attitude was particularly marked under Reagan in the Western Hemisphere where there was a determination to maintain hegemony in the face of concern about the spread of Cuban influence and the risk of instability. The vigour of the Reagan presidency (1981–9) underlines the role of individuals, linked as it was to the anti-Communist determination of Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and Margaret Thatcher. The first two helped undermine the Communist position in Poland, which challenged the impression of Soviet longevity in eastern Europe, while Thatcher encouraged Reagan in his anti-Soviet resolve. None of them was prepared to accept that the Cold War should, or could, end in a draw enforced by a threatening nuclear peace, and each was determined to win over what they saw as an immoral ideology.63 Indeed, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’. There was one case of American overreach in the shape of a poorly conceived and managed and ultimately unsuccessful intervention in Beirut in 1982–4. The Americans intervened, as part of an international force, in September 1982, but suicide bombings in October 1983 led to its withdrawal in 1984. The invasion of Grenada four days after the bombings was a demonstration that problems in one area did not necessarily mean overall failure. Although this invasion was not terribly well executed, the left-wing government was overthrown. More generally, the formulation of what became known as the Weinberger Doctrine (after Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense), with its call for commitments only in the event of predictable success and a clear exit strategy, reflected post-Vietnam caution

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and the precedence of protection for the military over diplomatic goals. Again, this can be seen in terms of a response to overreach, but the relative strength of the USA was demonstrated from the mid-1980s by the increasingly apparent crisis in the Soviet system. This affected Soviet client-states. Libya, a wealthy oil state whose military relied on Soviet arms and advisers, was bombed by the USA in 1986 in retaliation for Libya’s support for terrorism against American interests.64 Earlier in 1986, France had destroyed about three-quarters of the Libyan air force in a series of raids staged from Chad.65 That the USA could not also control Lebanon underlined not a systemic overreach but, rather, the extent to which power operates with contrasting constraints and effectiveness in differing spheres.

The fall of the Soviet Empire It is possible to treat the fall of the Soviet Union in terms of the confrontation between the great powers, but this underplays the autonomous character of developments. A degree of counterfactualism is also valuable, as it is overly easy to treat this fall as inevitable. If North Korea could keep ticking over in the 1990s and early 2000s, then a state with the resources of the Soviet Union could have kept stumbling along under a Brezhnevite system. While there is no doubt of the weaknesses both of the Communist regimes in eastern Europe and of the Soviet Union, there is no reason to believe that the course of events was clear-cut. A lack of inevitability, or indeed predictability, was true both for developments in the Communist bloc, where the trajectory of China over the past half-century is very much a reminder of unpredictability, and of the Western response. Indeed, some Western states and political parties thought it appropriate to prop up the Communist regimes to the east in the name of stability, although, after 1989–91, this tendency was rapidly forgotten. In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, it seemed at the peak of its power, not least because it was in secure control of eastern Europe. The West, however, adjusted to the economic challenges of the past four decades of the century with far less difficulty than did the Communist states, and shaped the resulting opportunities far more successfully. In the 1930s, the crisis of the capitalist model had helped produce a new authoritarianism in the shape of Nazi Germany and other states characterized by populism, corporatism and autarky. In contrast, in the 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s, widespread fiscal problems and unemployment, linked to globalist pressures, led either to the panacea of social welfare or to democratic conservative governments (particularly in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, 1979–90, and in the USA under Ronald Reagan, 1981–9, and George H.W.Bush 1989–93) that sought to ‘roll back the state’ and that pursued liberal economic policies, opening their markets and freeing currency movements and credit from most restrictions. The economic crises did not lead either to authoritarian regimes or to governmental direction of national resources. Economic difficulties encouraged the rise of far-right political parties—for example, in Austria, France, Italy and West Germany, but neither they nor the radical left were able to seize power, nor even to exercise much influence on political or economic policies in West Germany and France, although in Italy the far-right came into coalition government and it also became a key political player in Austria.

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The relative strength of the West politically and economically was accentuated by the continued division in the Communist bloc between China and the Soviet Union. Although not without many difficulties, closer relations with China gave the USA a vital geopolitical advantage, while also lessening Chinese concerns about the Soviet Union. In response to the Reaganite defence build-up, the Soviet Union, with a paranoid military leadership fed intelligence reports about a hostile USA by the powerful KGB intelligence agency, also adopted an aggressive pose, and in 1983 war between the two seemed imminent. However, Soviet policy changed greatly from the mid-1980s as a response to recognition of Soviet weaknesses. There was now a focus on international disengagement. This led to the withdrawal in 1988–9 of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, where they had failed to sustain the pro-Soviet Communist government in the face of American-financed guerrilla opposition. A search for stability also led to arms-control agreements with the USA from 1987. Domestically, Mikhail Gorbachev, who became leader in 1985, sought to modernize Communism by introducing reforms. The Communist command economies were in serious problems by the mid-1980s. Hamstrung by ideological mismanagement, earlier attempts to reform them had proved flawed. Détente had led to Western loans, particularly as a result of West German Ostpolitik, but these had not been translated into economic take-off and had, instead, increased indebtedness.66 Economic problems and the high rate of military expenditure (which Gorbachev wished to cut) limited the funds available for social investment and consumer spending, and this increasingly compromised popular support for the system. Alongside a rise in political opposition to the Communist regimes, especially the Solidarity movement in Poland, there was a widespread privatization of commitment on the individual and household level that left government and the Communist Party in a vacuum. Gorbachev unintentionally provoked the fall of the Eastern bloc. In the Soviet Union, economic reform led unexpectedly to political change, while his attempts to push through modernization in eastern Europe left the governments weak in the face of a popular demand for reform. This led to the successive collapse of Communist regimes in eastern Europe in 1989, and to multiparty politics and free elections. In October 1990, East Germany was united with West Germany, while, in 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved as the former republics, such as Ukraine, within what in theory had been a federal state, gained independence. One analysis of this shift very much locates it in terms of the economic confrontation seen as crucial by Paul Kennedy, not least with reference to the Reaganite claim to have won the Cold War by forcing the Soviet Union to admit defeat in the arms race. This, however, is a less than full account, whether of arms expenditure, economic issues or the collapse of Communism. As far as the first was concerned, the Soviet commitment to militarism in part was a product of competition with the West, but also owed much to the particular political and ideological character of the Soviet system. This indeed returns us, yet again, to the role of broadly understood cultural factors. The Soviet Union was a military super-power that lacked a solid basis of support. A paranoid sense of vulnerability, which can be traced back certainly to the seventeenth century but which owed much to the working of the Stalinist political system (predating the Second World War) and to Communist ideology, encouraged a major stress on military expenditure. Nearly a quarter of state expenditure went to military purposes in 1952, when the Soviet

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Union was not at war, and this figure increased as greater nuclear capability was added to the arsenal. The major economic gain of the 1950s and 1960s seen across most of the world, nevertheless, brought benefit in terms of Soviet living standards. This was particularly so under Leonid Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1953 to 1964, especially in terms of housing (a major emphasis for Khrushchev), but also in foodstuffs and clothing, although living standards did not match those in the USA and western Europe. By the early 1980s, defence expendi-ture was 15–25 per cent of GDP, and Gorbachev and his generation felt that any meaningful economic reform demanded cuts in this expenditure. Yet economic difficulties were not only or mainly a product of militarism, while Kennedy’s general model of economic problems as arising from imperial overstretch neglects the role of qualitative differences among economic systems. Totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, were command systems that were inherently prone to impose inefficient direction rather than to respond to advice, to interest groups and to consumer demand. Despite this, the Soviet Union and eastern Europe apparently enjoyed appreciable growth during the global Long Boom from the Second World War to the oil-price crisis of 1973. In part, this growth was a consequence of recovery from the war, as well as agricultural mechanization, industrial modernization, and the large-scale transfer of labour from agriculture to industry, although there is room for considerable scepticism about the growth figures. Communist governments put a heavy emphasis on heavy industry. In Hungary, for example, there was an attempt to create ‘a country of iron and steel’. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union boasted that it was overtaking the USA and western Europe, not simply in rockets and military hardware, but also in technological capability and better standards of living. This was totally wrong, in part because statistics were manipulated but also due to a systemic failure to ensure that accurate figures were obtained and that proper balance sheets were produced. This was an aspect of the problems arising from the inappropriate superimposition of control systems (structured round a new ideology of state control and planning, and Communism) on already existing social and economic systems that did not lend themselves to these means of direction. As an attempt at modernization, this proved unsuccessful and unpopular. It is also necessary to note the ruthless exploitation of eastern Europe for Soviet economic goals under Stalin, an exploitation that the Soviet government sought to extend to China, although the relationship with eastern Europe became far more equitable under Khrushchev. Furthermore, eastern Europe received a major subsidy in the form of cheap Soviet oil and gas. Moreover, the Communist economies were hit by the economic downturn of the mid1970s, and the government of Leonid Brezhnev lacked an effective response. Heavy investment in armaments was distorting for these economies, but, more generally, they suffered from the role of state planning, particularly by Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, and from the failure to develop the consumer spending that was so important in the USA and western Europe. This had a serious long-term consequence for the stability of the Soviet system, for a lack of popularity, particularly in eastern Europe, made it difficult for governments to view change and reform with much confidence. With time, the sham character of Communist progress became more apparent: to the peoples of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and to foreign commentators, although, in a serious failure of knowledge, analysis and assumptions, Western intelligence agencies were to be

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surprised by the speed of the eventual collapse. The Brezhnev regime (1964–82) was increasingly characterized by incompetence, corruption and sloth. The sham character of Communist progress helped ensure that the reform policies of the Gorbachev government, the attempt from 1985 to create ‘Socialism with a human face’, inadvertently destroyed Communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as the Soviet state. It proved impossible to introduce market responsiveness to a planned economy, while the post-Communist dismantling of the old command economy was to expose the uncompetitive nature of much of Soviet-era industry. Before the deluge, attempts from 1985 to achieve economic and political reform had faced the structural economic and fiscal weakness of the Soviet system, not least the preference for Gossnab, the State Supply Commission, over any price system that reflected cost and availability. These attempts led to an unpredicted public response that helped cause the end of Communist rule in 1989–91. In a sense, Communism was democratized, which was why it allowed itself to pass from the scene. Far from being made redundant by the advance of Communism, nationalism reemerged publicly as a powerful force, both in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. This culminated when Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, in effect successfully launched a Russian nationalist movement against the remaining structures of the Soviet Union.67 At the same time, there was no protracted attempt to use the extensive military resources of the Soviet state to prevent this collapse. This is a reminder of the drawbacks of preferring structural interpretations, whether based on army size or on economic capability, at the expense of considerations of mood, ideology and contingency. At the crudest level, in China there was a greater willingness to persist with the use of force in the suppression of dissent. Pro-democracy opposition in Beijing was crushed in June 1989, whereas, in Moscow, there was not such unity and force behind the maintenance of the Communist order. As a result, when force was used, it was fitful and unsuccessful. It is not clear how far the different developments in China and the Soviet Union reflected contrasting economic paths, political decisions or social systems. The events of 1989 indeed serve as a powerful reminder of the role of contingency in both China and the Soviet Union. This underlines the problem of offering political overstretch as a counterpart to strategic overreach. Had China gone on a parallel political course, then there might have been a geographical fracturing comparable to that of the Soviet Union, possibly affecting Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and with Taiwanese independence acknowledged. A focus on the weakness of the Soviet government as a result of the arms race leads to a top-down account of Soviet collapse. This is misleading as it directs attention from the views of the populace and the question of consent. As already indicated, in the discussion of wars of ‘national liberation’ (see p. 173), consent is a key issue, although, as this book repeatedly makes clear, there is a relationship between consent and coercion that is generally complex, being at times synergetical and at times contradictory. Furthermore, simply to write of the populace and consent can imply a democratic dimension that was not in fact the case as all consenters are not equal. In the case of the fall of the European and Soviet Communist regimes, there was an absence of popular support for the regimes that was very important, but even more crucial was the disengagement of Communist Party members, particularly those in their thirties and forties who had grown up in

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Party-controlled systems. They decided, correctly, that these systems were not working and that they could do better without existing arrangements. Their attempt to create a modified or ‘reformed’ Communist system of control helped cause the collapse of the system. This was similar to the end of the right-wing authoritarian Francoist regime in Spain in 1975 after the death of the dictator: the willingness of ostensible supporters to conceive of different arrangements and to adjust accordingly was, again, crucial to the fall of an authoritarian system. In both the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, support for Communism was affected by nationalism, which became a more central political issue from 1988. Nationalism apparently offered identity, freedom and a route to reform freed from a schlerotic imperial structure.68 The politics of cooperation and of its dissolution vary culturally and by conjuncture, as the differing fates of the Soviet Union and China, or of Mongolia and North Korea, exemplify. Attempts to explain these differing fates in economic terms, or with reference to other structural factors, risk offering a misplaced reductionism that fails to give due weight to the element and consequences of consent.

The growth of China American power was not the sole successive imperial narrative of these years. In China, the economic modernization of the world’s most populous state was pushed through from the 1980s without the collapse of authoritarian Communist rule, let alone control over peripheral regions. From one standpoint, this meant that political breakdown was avoided, but continued Communist control ensured that there was no transformation that might have brought political freedom or, at least, freedoms. Mao Zedong died in September 1976. Deng Xiaoping, who took power in 1978, pushed hard in the 1980s to move China towards economic liberalization. Deng believed it possible to keep political control of the Communist state while abandoning the Maoist policies of economic direction. Reform-driven growth became the government’s goal, and the 1978 constitution called for ‘planning through guidance’. China’s post-1978 growth represented a response to the opportunities for development offered by the demise of Communist central planning and the introduction of Western technology and management skills, although the latter process proved difficult. The extent and range of resources, not least of population, was also important, as was a combination of entrepreneurship and social control that the Soviet Union could not match but that ensured a low standard of living that kept labour costs down. In the 1990s, Chinese GNP rose more than sevenfold, increasing incomes and taking large numbers of Chinese out of poverty, although the reliability of Chinese government statistics is a matter for debate. China’s relative power was not a key theme of the period because it was overshadowed in political attention by the last stages of the Cold War and the collapse of European Communism. Furthermore, after its brief attack on North Vietnam in February—March 1979 (a largely unsuccessful attack that showed China’s readiness not to be deterred by Soviet—Vietnamese links but one that did not force Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia),69 China did not engage in any military commitments, whether local, in terms of frontier conflicts, or more distant. The conflicts in southern Africa and Central America in the 1980s were waged without Chinese participation. Partly as a

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result, China’s potential as a great power was underrated. China also remained a land empire.

The revival of Europe? The post-1945 drive for European integration is worthy of consideration not because what started as the European Economic Community (EEG) and ended, so far, as the European Union (EU), fulfilled the hopes of its bolder supporters, but, rather, as the entire episode indicated an attempt to create a new type of power and suggested that this might define at least part of the international system. The relationship of European integration with shifts in global power is also instructive. During the Second World War, there were ideas of creating large defence blocs, and, in the late 1940s, there was stronger interest in cooperation, whether a Western bloc, a Western European Third Force, separate from the USA and the Soviet Union, or a Western Union. These, in part, reflected a sense that only thus would it be possible to provide security. Indeed, in March 1950, Ernest Bevin, Labour’s Foreign Secretary, declared in the House of Commons, that ‘the day when we, as Great Britain, can declare a policy independently of our allies, has gone’. At that stage, however, the descent into Cold War and the recognition of the economic, political and military weakness of western Europe in the face of Soviet strength, and of the feebleness of the western European response, led to a reliance on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This replaced the idea of a Third Force, reflected the absence of a European solution to the German question and, more centrally, was the product of American willingness to avoid the temptations of isolation.70 NATO itself was rapidly enlarged to include Italy, Portugal, Norway and Denmark (1949), and Greece and Turkey (1952), which represented a major expansion of containment into Scandinavia and the Mediterranean, despite British reluctance about the latter. NATO, however, did not end attempts to strengthen western Europe through integration and to anchor Germany by subsuming its soon-to-be-rearmed military in an international military league. France, indeed, advanced plans for a western European army, the European Defence Community. Rejected in the end by the French National Assembly in 1954, this had been seen as a way to control German rearmament, a response to the need for a normalization of relations and the military equivalent to the plans for a coal and steel union, which led the European Coal and Steel Community (EGSG) agreed by the Treaty of Paris in 1951. The EGSG, established in 1952, in part reflected the belief that, through the integration of economies, the states of western Europe would never again go to war with one another. The EGSG was the direct precursor to the EEG, with the same six original members, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. For West Germany, multilateralism offered a way to recreate an acceptable German identity and to bind it to the West,71 while the European fear of Germany contributed to the same end. There was also a wider political resonance in that the movement for western European unity owed much to the growth of Christian Democratic parties.72 Indeed, the institutions founded as a consequence reflected their norms.

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As a result of the Messina conferences of 1955 and 1956, and the Treaty of Rome of 1957, the EEG was established in 1958. The Treaty of Rome pledged to work for ‘an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’. It is often argued that French policy was driven by the consequences of the unsuccessful Anglo-French action against Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956, particularly French anger with the British climbdown, but, in fact, French policy was already focused on the establishment of the EEG, and this was cemented by German willingness to accept the concessions France required. Nevertheless, there was a degree of transfer of cultural mission from overseas empire to an attempt, not only to strengthen French identity,73 but also to create a new Europe. The Treaty of Rome provided that tariffs within the EEG were to be removed within twelve to fifteen years which, in the end, meant by 1968. This led to a rapid growth of trade within the EEG, which enhanced profitability and encouraged investment. In the first fifteen years of the EEG, Germany had an average annual growth rate of 5 per cent and overtook Britain as the strongest west European economy. France had an average growth rate of 5.5 per cent, while Italian industrial exports also boomed. German growth reflected growing global demand, but also the economic liberalization pushed by Ludwig Erhard, who directed economic policy from 1948 to 1963 and was Federal Chancellor from 1963 to 1966. This liberalization was a major break from the cartels characteristic of earlier German history. Influenced by liberal-minded economists, the West German government adopted pro-competition policies. Its economic and financial system contrasted with the nationalizations and state control seen in France and Britain, let alone Communist East Germany, to which the West German concept of the social market was deliberately a rival model.74 The USA was keen for Britain to join the EEG, an aspect of the long-term American strategy to move Britain from imperial power to the supporter of, indeed voice for, American interests in Europe. The British had earlier assumed that the USA would be ready to cooperate with Britain separately and closely, but this proved unfounded. The USA was happy in the 1950s to encourage Franco-German reconciliation as an aspect of a necessary European self-reliance, but, in the early 1960s, President Kennedy pressed Britain to join the EEG because he feared that Charles de Gaulle, French President from 1958 to 1969, had ambitions to lead a Europe separate from American interests, and that the EEG might prove the basis for this Third Force. Indeed, with the Fouchet Plan pushed from 1961, de Gaulle envisaged a European Political Union, but the plan failed.75 Having had two applications to join rejected due to French opposition, Britain joined the EEG in 1973, as did Ireland and Denmark. Greece followed in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986, with membership seen at least in part as a way to cement the collapse of authoritarian regimes in the three states and to prevent their resurgence. Spain also joined NATO in 1986, the first new member since West Germany in 1955. The nature of the EEG changed in the late 1980s. In large part, this reflected shifts in French politics. During the Giscard d’Estaing presidency of France (1974–81), the conservative Barre government (1976–81) had pursued an economic liberalization, cutting the government’s role and emphasizing market forces, not least in putting the control of inflation above unemployment. These policies, however, were dramatically reversed in 1981, after the Socialist candidate, François Mitterand, won the presidential election. In many respects, the policies subsequently followed in France in 1981–3 linked the traditional nostrums of the left and of state control and intervention, with the

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aspirations for regulation and social management that underlay aspects of the European integrationist movement. Reflation in France focused less on modernization than on support for historic constituencies (coal, steel and shipbuilding in the early 1980s, agriculture today), while a determined effort was made to control manufacturing and the financial system. Taxation in France was directed towards redistribution, with a wealth tax matched by an increase in the minimum wage and a cut in the working week. This French experience was also anticipatory of current French and EU attitudes in that it rested in part on a refusal to accept the disciplines posed by international economic competition and, indeed, their rejection as alien Anglo-American concepts. Mitterand’s ambitious policies, however, had rapidly been thwarted by economic realities, part of a more general crisis of ambitious welfare state policies. To many French politicians, Europe seemed an alternative way to give effect to their visions and on their terms. In 1985, Jacques Delors became President of the European Commission and he revived the policy of European integration. France’s ambitions for the EEG were accentuated when German unification became an option, as deeper European integration seemed a way to contain Germany, just as the original establishment of the EEG had been seen as a way to anchor West Germany. Mitterand agreed to unification on condition that Germany accept French plans for a ‘closer’ EEG and one under Franco-German control. The American government, in contrast, was far more willing to support German unification.76

Conclusions The aspiration to European unification was, therefore, heavily affected by geopolitics, first in the shape of the Soviet challenge and subsequently in the response to German unification. European unification represented a quest for power that proposed the creation of a new type of state, a confederal union drawing on a common culture. The economic drawbacks and diplomatic deficit of what became the EU ensure that the value of the project to Europe’s citizens can be doubted, but it was important as an opportunity to consider new ways of exercising power. At the end of the 1980s, it was widely believed that this project had great potential and that underlined the variety of forms that international power could take. At the same time, it would be bizarre to close a consideration of this period with a discussion of the EU. Instead, it was American power that was most evident. Interviewed by the Yale newspaper in 1991, after the close of the First Gulf War, in which an American-led coalition had rapidly routed Iraqi forces, driving them from Kuwait, Kennedy argued that the result did not vitiate the conclusions of his book about American overstretch. Ironically, the period 1989–92 was to suggest not only that American hegemony was well entrenched but also that there had been an earlier failure to appreciate the weaknesses of the Soviet Union and the deficiencies of Communism. In short, an effects-based American hegemony was further demonstrated by the failure of the major rival. This indicated a need to move attention away from American defeats, particularly Vietnam, and the structural deficiencies of American society, economics and politics, considerable and important as they were; and, instead, to use the relative dimension to emphasize American strength.77

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This strength was worldwide. It is possible to link it to a trajectory of Western power by arguing that, from 1944, the position of leading naval power moved from Britain to the USA and that this provides the latest iteration of a sequence of navalist changes within the West. However, in large part, American military power rested not on naval strength but on America’s ability to engage with, invest in, and dominate new forms of military capability, particularly aircraft, nuclear weaponry, rockets and satellites. These offered forms of power projection that were very much stronger than the British navy could provide, although there was a common theme of the containment of Continental empires. The transitional link with Britain is clearer in the case of financial strength, with the transition here being one that had started in the 1910s. The ends of power, however, were very different. In its Victorian heyday, at a time of great imperial expansion, British strategic culture was based on power preservation. That remained the case thereafter as Britain strove to resist hegemonic German aspirations. The USA, which did not seek empire, had, from the 1940s, however, a strategic culture focused on an ideological confrontation with what was perceived as an anti-American movement posing a challenge that could be seen as metaphysical. Although containment was a key American method during the Cold War, this confrontation, in an era of atomic weaponry and, subsequently, intercontinental missiles, was not one in which power preservation seemed enough. Instead, strategic culture confronted and encompassed the prospect of global destruction as an aspect of deterrence. The means were provided by scientific expertise, applied technology and economic resources, but parameters and goals were, in part, set in response to powerful ideological currents. Such currents could also be seen in the successive falls of empire discussed in this chapter as well as in the extent to which revanchism did not recur after 1945, as it had done after 1918, all of which had important consequences for international relations.

9 American hegemony, 1991–2007? The early 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a degree of American power, financial, economic and military, that led critics to complain about the existence of a hyper-power, a critical variant on the term ‘superpower’. At the same time, there was concern in the USA that the country was in relative decline, and that American hegemony, if it existed, was precarious. This contrast rose to a height in the mid-2000s, as failure in Iraq and worry about the rise in Chinese economic and financial strength, as well as related geopolitical problems, led to considerable anxieties in the USA. Although not without its problems and concerns, the 1990s were a period of particular confidence for the USA, perhaps without parallel since the period immediately after the Second World War. After 1945, American hegemony had been a factor in the process of European decolonization, and it had also benefited from the process. A similar development could be seen with the fall of the Soviet system. At the start of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq in 1991 led to talk of a ‘new world order’ and of the ‘end of history’. These claims rested on the belief that Soviet collapse represented a triumph for American-led democratic capitalism and that there would be no future clash of ideologies to destabilize the world. In some respects, this optimism reflected a resurgence of the high hopes held with the foundation of the United Nations in 1945 and a conviction that American-led global multilateralism could and would work. Global politics were reshaped in the early 1990s. Unlike France in 1789–92, Russia did not swing from revolution to dangerous warmaker. Indeed, Russia became weaker, Boris Yeltsin, its president from 1990 to 2000, remarking that trying to mix Communism and a free market was like trying to mate a hedgehog with a snake. If this, alongside the problems of seeking to match a planned economy with decentralization and innovation, had been a cause of the problems facing reform in the late 1980s, the situation when Communism and the planned economy had disappeared was not a dramatic improvement.1 Furthermore, the decline in Russian military readiness, when combined with continued American capability, dramatically rewrote the military balance, as Soviet nuclear parity was lost.2 The potency of American missiles also rose considerably. The Trident II D-5 sea-launched ballistic missile, deployed from 1990, greatly increased the accuracy of such missiles, while its ability to use the W88 warhead increased their yield and, therefore, capability.3 At the strategic level, Russia’s inability to match the USA in missile development and deployment was a major shift from the situation during the Cold War. Regional opportunities for American intervention were provided by Soviet collapse as aggressive, hostile powers, especially Iraq, now lacked a sponsor. The Serbian rump of the former Yugoslavia also suffered from the inability of Russia to provide support. The eastward expansion of NATO was another result. The USA and other Western powers also established a degree of military cooperation with Soviet successor states that did not

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join NATO: for example, from 1994, Ukraine’s military was given US money to fund joint events under military cooperation agreements. In some respects, however, the political situation was less propitious for the USA. Across much of the world in the 1990s, identity and conflict were shaped and expressed in terms of ethnicity, a practice that did not provide opportunities for American leadership. The upsurge of ethnic violence in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus and much of Central Africa, most bloodily Rwanda in 1994, indicated the persistence of deep-seated tensions, while the unsuccessful UN intervention in Somalia in 1992–4, in which the Americans played a major role, proved a huge humiliation. Thereafter, no American troops were sent on peacekeeping missions to Africa. More generally, under President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) the military was cut by a third and weapons procurement was reduced. This was linked to a caution about policy in the Middle East that contrasted with the more assertive and bellicose situation after 11 September 2001. Under Clinton, threats to Saddam Hussein were not matched by action, while the challenge posed by Islamic terrorism was not adequately met, although cruise-missile strikes were launched against terrorist bases in Afghanistan and Sudan, strikes of which the Republicans were sharply critical. An internationalism that had major impact in the 1990s was that of religion, particularly Islam. In many countries, hostility to globalization meant opposition to modernism and modernization and thus could draw on powerful interests and deep fears. The hostile focus was frequently on the alleged standard bearers of globalization, especially the USA and multinational companies. This weakened the chance of sustaining alliances of sympathy. In 1997, on the tenth anniversary of the appearance of his great work, Paul Kennedy wrote in the Atlantic Magazine: The United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of Great Powers, of what might be called ‘imperial overstretch’: that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far too large for the country to be able to defend them all simultaneously.

Economic developments At the same time, the USA showed major strengths as an economy. The ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s, a combination of stagnation and inflation which led to a sense of uncertainty and malaise, did not recur. Instead, there was significant economic growth. This was helped by a marked fall in real energy prices in the mid-1980s, a fall that resumed after a spike in 1990 as a result of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and also by the continued capacity of the American economy for innovation, not least as a result of moving into new areas of demand, such as personal computers. The USA had the requisite resources for economic development, which focused more on the skills and investment required for increasingly complex manufacturing processes than on the raw materials needed for basic processes. The ability both to contain wage inflation and to raise productivity significantly was also

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important. It reflected, in part, the social politics of the Reagan years, not least the limited role of organized labour in the economic and political systems. The American economy also benefited from the important structural reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s, which, in part, entailed a move away from earlier corporatist practices. Capital invested per worker remained high, and the openness of the internal economy and market, accentuated by deregulation, encouraged the speedy diffusion of most efficient economic practices and capital flow to whatever seemed profitable, and, in the event of it not being successful, to other investments. A marked rise in labour productivity, as well as organizational efficiency within business and finance, permitted major growth in a tight labour market without inflationary pressures. International trade liberalization in the 1990s was also important. In contrast to claims about likely decline, America’s position in the global economy was indicated by the substantial rise in its shape of global exports—from 15.7 per cent in 1993 to 17.7 per cent in 1999—and that in a period of major growth in world trade, as well as a rise of the American percentage of the world’s GDP and of America’s contribution to the increasing gap in percapita income between the West and the rest.4 This economic strength was of great benefit to the American military as it provided a basis for funding the major expansion of the 2000s. At the same time, the central role of the USA was shown in the successful risk management seen in the 1990s, particularly in the management of the Mexican financial crisis of 1994–5, the Asian liquidity crisis of 1997–8, and the Russian debt non-payment in 1998. These crises indicated the strains, in the shape of large-scale financial volatility, created by extensive investment and the major rise in liquidity but also revealed that the financial architecture of the post-1944 world was stronger than its inter-war predecessor. This strength owed much to the institutions created and sustained from 1944, to the intervening growth in the world economy and to American leadership in the 1990s. Indeed, the economic problems of other parts of the world in the 1990s helped highlight American strengths at the same time as these problems, at least in part, arose as a consequence of the pressures caused by the spread of a capitalism that was organized by American institutions. Furthermore, the USA was of great importance to other states as a market. This was true whether they sold directly to the American market or indirectly, through, in particular, China and Japan. Thus, growth in East and South-East Asia owed much to markets and opportunities created by expansion in USA and Japan, while the two countries also provided much of the investment which the states of East and South-East Asia were not able to generate domestically, despite very high savings ratios. California played a key role in the Pacific rim system. Regional growth was not without its weaknesses, and these were seen in 1997–8 in an emerging markets crisis that began in Thailand and spread rapidly, particularly to Indonesia. Related, though separate, there was also a serious problem with declining growth in Japan in the 1990s and early 2000s. In both cases, there were serious problems with financial systems, reflecting a lack of control over lending during the period of rapid growth, combined with speculative pressures—for example, over real estate in Japan— and a degree of corruption involving overly close links between politics and finance. This crony capitalism ensured that governmental investment in the economy was not properly costed. Aside from large quantities of non-performing loans, there was a serious problem with shallow capital markets in Asia. The regional funds and bonds markets that might help provide stable, long-term investment were weak, in part because of cultural and

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political issues relating to trust in institutions. Given crony capitalism, the tendency of governments to intervene in business, and often opaque financial practices, it was not surprising that there was a willingness to invest in the West where financial markets appeared more regular and transparent. Trust as a cultural dimension of economic and political power is a theme of this book. The weakness of local capital markets also helped ensure that foreign direct investment was important in economic growth, not least in China.5 Japan itself faced a serious banking crisis in 1997. Japanese deflation was linked to the failure to introduce structural reforms in the economy and to serious fiscal mismanagement. A modest recovery began only in 2002, but it remained modest. The structural rigidity of the Japanese economy was matched by that of Germany, and this provided an ironic commentary on Paul Kennedy’s work as he had favoured their economic trajectory rather than that of the USA. Linked to this, Kennedy had both a systemic and a specific preference for the effectiveness of government intervention. In the event, both Japan and Germany saw high rates of such intervention, whereas the USA, which grew more in the 1990s, had relatively little intervention. Similarly, in India, a switch to higher rates of growth, from an average annual rise in GDP of 3.5 per cent in the 1950s–1970s, to 6 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, and over 8 per cent in 2003–6, owed much to a major shift towards economic liberalization, thanks to reforms in the early 1990s that lessened bureaucracy, freed up capital markets and encouraged competition and therefore productivity. In light of Kennedy’s critique of strategic overreach and his argument that it led to political and economic decline, it is also worth noting that Japan did not show such overreach. Germany did, in the shape of reintegrating the formerly Communist East Germany, but the overreach was more a matter of the financial terms offered than of any protection costs necessary as a result of the eastward expansion of the state. Indeed, the end of Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe and the alacrity to join NATO and the EU displayed by former Communist powers ensured that the protection costs were particularly low. Helped by exports to a booming USA, some regional economies, such as Malaysia and South Korea, rebounded rapidly from the crisis of the late 1990s, but this crisis revealed important problems with economic fundamentals. Thus, doubt was shed on the bold claims made in the early and mid-1990s that the age of American ascendancy, economic and otherwise, was drawing to a close, and that it would be replaced by that of East Asia. The ratio of economic indicators between the USA and Japan certainly moved back in favour of the former. Rather than arguing back from American economic and fiscal problems in the mid-2000s in order to see a long-term decline, whether caused by imperial overstretch or not, it is pertinent to note the relative and absolute strength of the USA in the 1990s. That is not to deny deep-seated issues and problems, such as labour costs relative to East Asia, but it does encourage consideration of the policies in the 2000s as a major cause of the difficulties of that period. In the late 1990s, talk of Asian dominance, and of the challenge to the USA, came to focus on China, in place of Japan, which had been the subject of the book The Coming War (1991). The Communist regime had long been concerned to further industrialization, but this process had been slowed by the rigidities of central planning and by the failure to raise agricultural productivity sufficiently, which was, in part, a consequence of the

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doctrinaire land policies of Mao Zedong. In contrast, under Deng Xiaoping, freeing prices, permitting private businesses, giving farmers the right to retain surpluses and attracting foreign investment, helped ensure a boom that also owed much to the availability of international markets, particularly Japanese and American. The introduction of Western technology and management skills was also important, although difficult. In the 1990s, market reforms were pushed further in China. In place of sectionalized liberalization, not least in the Special Economic Zones created in 1984, came a more determined effort to make a ‘socialist market economy’ work and trade competitively. Growth rates rose markedly: Chinese GDP rose 10.5 per cent in 2006, compared to 9.2 per cent for India (for the year to September 2006), 3.4 for the USA, 2.7 for the Euro area, 2.6 for Britain and 2.3 for Japan. China came to enjoy an important comparative advantage over other exporters, both regional and further afield. This attracted inward investment, which, by 2000, was the second largest in the world after the USA. China’s economic links with the USA came to match those of Japan in importance, complexity and political sensitivity, with American economic lobbies critical of Chinese competition benefiting from wider American insecurities about Chinese intentions.6 The latter were political and military, as well as economic. Part of the China fear was a product of the Department of Defense trying to find a way to justify continued large budgets. In 1996, two American carrier groups were dispatched to the Strait of Taiwan in reply to a missile test by China designed to influence the elections that year in Taiwan. This was a clear statement of American intent, not only in defence of an ally (which was also a significant commercial and financial partner), but also in support of democracy: realist containment being matched by a clear ideological commitment. The strategic challenge led the USA in 1997 to decide to include China in American nuclear-war plans, which led to targets there appearing in the Single Integrated Operating Plan of 1998. In contrast, there was no rapid economic growth in the ex-Communist Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union had been a major world economy, but the successor parts were to prove less than the sum of the former whole. In particular, it proved difficult to establish effective monetary and fiscal mechanisms, while turning to Western ideas on economic and financial policies contributed to a more general crisis in Russian self-confidence. Western loans were necessary in order to prevent a total collapse of Russia in the 1990s, but Russian debt payments caused a severe crisis in 1998, leading to default and devaluation. Both there and in eastern Europe, there was no smooth transition to capitalism and democracy. Instead, the bankruptcy of large parts of the former Communist command economies, much of which had been uncompetitive, and the dismantling of social welfare, led to a major rise in unemployment, poverty and social polarization. Public culture was affected by disillusionment and government corruption, the symptom of a wider disinclination for reform, and privatized economies displayed a new vulnerability to international trends. By 2000, Poland, Slovenia and Hungary had recovered to surpass their GDP of 1990, while the Czech Republic only managed to equalize this, and in Romania, Bulgaria and Russia there had been a decline. However, the extent of post-Communist decline assumes accurate GDP figures during the Communist period, which is problematic, not least because they included a large amount of fairly useless production. There has also been a significant change in incentive structures. Under the Communist system, the incentives

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were all for producers to claim quality and quantity in production that they had not in fact achieved. Now, with taxation, the incentives are precisely the opposite. The result is that the extent of decline has been systematically overstated. In the ex-Communist world, economic disruption and problems affected political stability, although there were also the problems of establishing and bedding down new political and legal systems and practices. These were accentuated by the self-interested rule of a number of leaders, not least Yeltsin, who proved only too willing to manipulate the Russian constitution. It was scarcely surprising, given the attempted coup in 1991 or the violent political crisis of 1993, and the marked revival of the nationalities question, that Russia’s international influence declined. The authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin, who became president in 2000, however, brought a measure of stability. Russia’s influence was then accentuated by improved relations with China, as well as by the increased value of its raw materials, particularly oil and gas, and their supply was used by Putin for political ends. Even if Russia is not as potent in relative terms as it was during the Cold War, it retains both ambition, reflected in Putin’s Annual Address to the Federal Assembly in 2005 in which he described the end of the Soviet Union as the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century’, and the capacity to take an aggressive stance towards its neighbours, particularly in the Caucasus region and Central Asia. This may produce a new, smaller version of the Cold War, one in which the ideological tension is different, but the power politics still focused on competition via protégés. Geopolitics indeed has come to the fore in Russian strategic culture. It was always there, but the ideological overlay is now largely absent or, rather, is presented in terms of an assertion of national sovereignty. Russian policy over both the Iraq war of 2003 and Iran’s attempt to develop a nuclear capability was hostile to American views. The extent to which Western investment was sought in the former and still Communist world—for example, American capital in Vietnam in the 2000s—was a powerful testimony to the relative weakness of the region. Moreover, Western investment helped foster economic growth in eastern Europe in the 2000s, with Poland and Estonia as star performers and growth spurts in many previous laggards. Other signs of American influence included the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect in 1994. This strengthened links between the American economy and those of Canada and Mexico. Further south, economic liberalism was important to government policy in much of Latin America. The role of the dollar was seen in 2000, when Ecuador withdrew its currency, the sucre, in order to switch to the dollar, followed by El Salvador in 2001.

The revolution in military affairs assessed American economic growth, financial strength and geopolitical ambitions contributed to belief in a new military system and process of military change that would enable the USA to remain the leading power and achieve its goals without the traumas of major war or, indeed, a need to direct large-scale industrial capability to such an eventuality. What was described as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and subsequently transformed by analysts into the latest of a series of such revolutions was presented as cause, evidence

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and product of status as an effective power and as a process that the USA could direct and dominate. The RMA met the American need to believe in the possibility of highintensity conflict and of total victory, with opponents shocked and awed into accepting defeat, rather than to accept American participation in the ambiguous and qualified nature of conflict and victory in the real world. This certainty was attractive not only psychologically and politically, particularly in the face of fragile public support for difficult conflicts,7 but also in response to the changing threat environment. Thus, the RMA appeared to offer a defence against the threats posed by the spread of earlier technologies, such as long-range missiles and atomic war-heads, of new ones, such as bacteriological warfare, and of whatever might follow. For example, North Korea, which, in 2003, was the first signatory state to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in 2006 first test-fired seven missiles, especially a long-range Taepodong-2, and then conducted an underground nuclear test. In short, the RMA was focused on the management of risk, a common goal in policy but one that is misrepresented when it is presented as entailing the suppression of risk. Indeed, preparing to stand for president, George W.Bush in September 1999 told an audience at the Citadel, a military academy, that the best way to keep the peace was to redefine war on American terms. Elected in 2000, Bush declared at the Citadel the following year, ‘The first priority is to speed the transformation of our military’. At the same time, it is necessary to be cautious in suggesting too much coherence and consistency in the idea of an RMA, a point more generally true of other such constructs. A less harsh view can be advanced if the RMA of the 1990s and 2000s is presented as a doctrine designed to meet political goals and thus to shape or encourage technological developments and operational and tactical suppositions accordingly, rather than to allow technological constraints to shape doctrine and thus risk the danger of inhibiting policy. Indeed, if the RMA is seen as a discourse designed to win the argument, within and outside the military, for investment in a particular doctrine and force structure, in short as the ideology of transformation, then, at the operational and tactical levels, it can be seen as of value, provided that care is taken to ensure that the risks and complexities of military tasks are not ignored. At both operational and tactical levels, there have been important advances in overcoming the problems of command and control posed by the number of formations operating simultaneously and in fulfilling the opportunities for command and control gained by successfully overcoming this challenge, and thus aggregating sensors, shooters and deciders, to achieve a precise mass effect from dispersed units. It is not new that better communications enable more integrated fire support and the use of radar and surveillance to permit more accurate targeting, and of radio provides a key example of this process, but these possibilities have been taken forward by the new technology that attracts the attention of RMA enthusiasts. Thus, to continue the theme of mapping seen earlier in the book (pp. 65–9), the digitization of the Earth’s surface that has resulted from satellite mapping has played a major role in enabling weapons to operate by remote control. RMA advocates emphasize the need for speed in order to get within opposing decision cycles, which are also to be deliberately disorientated and disrupted. Again, this is not new, but it has been given a central role at the tactical and operational levels. The mistake is to assume that this has clear strategic results, not least in terms of warwinning. Military output—for example, bombs dropped—is not the same as military

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outcome, such as leading to victory, and this is a fundamental lesson that qualifies the general emphasis on military capabilities, particularly if understood in terms of material resources. Perception is all-important here, particularly the perception of those faced by superior, in the sense of greater, capability and output.8 In the 1990s and early 2000s, Western, especially American, economic growth and borrowing capacity and American resource allocation, gave substance to triumphalist ideas, because they made it easier to afford investment in new military systems; or, at least, the development of earlier ones. However, uncertainty over the nature and appropriateness of tasking and the possibility of achieving outcomes complicates the situation. The combination of this uncertainty and the variety of national strategic cultures certainly ensures that military transformation has to be understood as a number of processes designed to meet a number of goals, rather than simply one process, defined and determined by, and for, the USA, and thus an aspect of American power, including ‘soft power’. If the RMA ends up meaning a varied process of change, then it becomes, at least to a considerable extent, a truism and a platitude. The value of the RMA as an analytical tool, whether for the 1990s or for earlier episodes, is therefore limited. A RMA, instead, is an apparent short-cut that in practice has only limited explicatory capacity. This, of course, is the fate of many tendencies styled by their advocates (or others) as revolutionary. This is particularly so because they reify the complexities of change and abstract them from the multiple contexts that convey meaning. This, however, does not make clear how best to consider the nature and cause of military change, let alone its relationship with great-power status in the modern world. Alongside changes in military technology and in the tasks arising from geopolitical shifts, action-reaction cycles, with militaries responding to each other, remain a key explanation of military change. Non-military processes are also significant; insofar as the distinction between military and non-military has value. These non-military processes can be seen not only with technology in, for example, the impact of modern electronics and telecommunications or, earlier, steam power on land and sea (railroads and steamships), or the telegraph, or with organizational developments, or with reference to the general issue of the impact of social trends. A modern example of the latter is provided by the decline in the acceptability of conscription and by changing social attitudes towards the role of women with the resulting consequences in terms of female military service. The narrative and analysis of military effectiveness, and great-power status, during the Cold War were based around the concept of total war and the move to that capability. As such, earlier history could be organized and the apparent significance of change detected. A related narrative was that of dominance by advanced industrial economies. Now, the former and, in some respects, the latter approach seems far less secure, with Western total-war capacity not providing the key element in military success. As a result, there is a need to think through a different approach to military history. Shorn of revolutionary language, current issues can be profitably reexamined from the perspective not of a revolution in military affairs but of a period of major changes in military tasking. This reflects the combination of the end of the Cold War and the longerterm rise in the number of international players that followed decolonization, combined with the instability of some of the areas from which colonial control withdrew, particularly Africa and the Middle East. Ideology and belief, in both periphery and metropole, continue to make rule by others seem aberrant rather than normative. Great

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power status is no longer measured in part in terms of colonial control. As a result, the years of American hegemony have not altered the situation seen during the Cold War when there was such a marked contrast between growing technological prowess on the part of the leading powers and the more limited role they sought, and success they enjoyed, as colonial powers. These fundamentals were also true of the 1990s and 2000s. Linked to this, imperialism has been reconceptualized away from a focus on colonial control and, instead, towards a greater emphasis on military and economic power that was differently expressed. This, in part, represented a return to aspects of earlier imperialism, for example that of the British in nineteenth-century Latin America.

American power in the 2000s The 2000s suggested that the analysis of the USA as a hyper-power, a description given currency by Hubert Vedrine, who had been French Foreign Minister, had to give due weight to challenges and limitations, a contrast captured in some of the discussion of America as an empire. In September 2001, the ability of a virulently anti-American, Islamic terrorist organization, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement, to strike with brutal impact on New York and Washington, focused and accentuated American concerns about developments in the Islamic world and their own vulnerability. The optimism that had followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the success of the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991 was finally shattered. The newly revealed vulnerability led to a determination to try to use America’s power in order to transform the situation and end the threat. The attacks helped to ensure that the administration took a more determined position in warfare in the early 2000s than had been the case in the Balkans in the 1990s. In a self-styled ‘War on Terror’, which reflected the post-9/11 focus and galvanization of American policy, the American Government attacked what were identified as terrorist bases and supporters, a crucial stage in the more general movement towards action that had followed the end of the Cold War. In 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had refused to hand over al-Qaeda leaders, was overthrown, with significant American air and financial support for the Northern Alliance of Afghans playing a central role. There was also a major build-up in military expenditure. In 2000, the USA spent 295 billion on its military budget, and Russia and China combined spent 100 billion, although it is probable that they both under-estimated (and underestimate) their expenditure, China being particularly reticent about its space programme. Thus, official Chinese military expenditure in 2005 was 30 billion, but the American Department of Defense estimated it at closer to 90 billion. Official figures also understate Russia’s military budget. By 2001, American military spending, which had been 276 billion in 1998, had risen to 310 billion, which was more than the next nine largest national military budgets combined, although American economic growth ensured that this was only half of the percentage of GDP spent under Reagan. For 2002, American expenditure was about 40 per cent of the world’s total military spending, although expectations of, and costs for, items such as pay, food and social benefits varied across the world. Russian conscripts are still paid essentially nothing, while American volunteer soldiers are paid a good salary. Russia’s defence spending thus looks much lower than it would if it were

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calculated on a comparable basis. By 2006, the percentage of the world’s total military expenditure spent by the USA was closer to a half. In 2005, the defence budget was 440 billion, nearly half of the discretionary (i.e., non-mandated) expenditure by the federal government and about 17.5 per cent of its total expenditure. In 2006, the draft defence budget presented for 2007 asked for 441.3 billion, although the supplemental bills to cover operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ensured that defence expenditure in 2007 will be over 500 billion. Expenditure was linked to strategic ambition. The National Security Strategy issued by the American Government in September 2002 pressed the need for pre-emptive strikes in response to what were seen as the dual threats of terrorism and of ‘rogue states’ possessing or developing weapons of mass destruction and sought to transform the global political order so as to lessen the chance of these threats developing. To that end, the first paragraph proposed a universalist message that linked the end of the Cold War to the new challenge and proposed the global extension of American values as the answer: The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom… These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages… We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent. Regime change was thus necessary to ensure peace. These scenarios were challenged, however, both militarily and economically. In 2003, the focus was on Iraq—a definite and defiant target with regular armed forces—rather than on the more intangible struggle with terrorism. US concern about proliferation to the benefit of a hostile regime provided the pretext for war that year, though misperceptions or even apparently deliberate exaggeration and deception on the part of the Bush administration make it difficult to assess its true motivations for the invasion (and the same is true of Tony Blair). In the context of post-9/11 anxieties, concern about proliferation provided President Bush with an opportunity to invade Iraq, which he already wanted to do. Cultural misperception seems to have dominated on both sides. The opportunistic Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein appears to have believed the USA would not invade, and that, if they did, that the problems of urban warfare would lessen American technological advantages and lead to casualties that would oblige the American government to change policy. This was an analysis that was certainly mistaken in the short term and that, anyway, could not prevent conquest by a well-organized and high-tempo Americandominated invasion force. Similarly, his hope that international pressure, particularly from France and Russia via the United Nations, would prevent the Americans from acting, proved an inaccurate reading of the dynamics of contemporary international relations. In turn, the Americans seriously misjudged the consequences in Iraq of a successful invasion. The coherence of the Saddam regime, its ability to intimidate the population and the possibility of exploiting American vulnerability along their long lines of advance and supply were all hit by the high tempo of the American invasion in 2003. This attack

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accentuated weaknesses in the regime, including its fear of the Iraqi military and concern about the possibility of the army mounting a coup against Saddam. Much of the Republican Guard in which Saddam placed his trust in fact ran away in the face of American firepower; US air power proved especially effective. Units that redeployed, or stood and fought, were pulverized, with particular US effort being devoted to destroying Iraqi armour. Once they had closed on Baghdad, the Americans launched ‘thunder runs’, armoured thrusts into the city, demonstrating that their opponents could not prevent these advances and, therefore, undermining their position. The Americans thus showed that manoeuvre warfare could work in an urban context. Having captured Baghdad, the Americans pressed on to overrun the rest of Iraq. British forces played a supporting role in the conquest of southern Iraq, although one that was tangential to the focus of the campaign. There were, however, indications in the conquest that the military situation would be less propitious in the long term. The Iraqi attacks on supply lines—for example, at the Euphrates bridge-town of Nasiriya—attracted considerable media attention, but the forces available for such attacks were a local irritant that could be bypassed on the drive to Baghdad rather than being operationally significant. The use of Fedayeen irregulars, some of whom fought vigorously, led, however, to somewhat naïve complaints about such tactics as disguise or faked surrenders. This resistance had seemed inconsequential in the short term, but, both tactically and operationally, the resistance prefigured the problems that were to become more acute after it proved impossible to stabilize Iraq. The mistake in assuming a top-down approach to the situation, in which the ‘decapitation’ of the Iraqi leadership (and the overrunning of the capital, Baghdad) would ensure that the tempo of success could be sustained, was to be demonstrated.9 Instead, a critically insufficient number of troops to secure order in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, inappropriate policy decisions about disbanding the Iraqi military and de-Baathifying the country, and ham-handed American policy at the local level, helped fan a Sunni insurgency. They were also responsible for exacerbating and inflaming already strong internal divides in Iraq, including Shia-Sunni rivalry and Arab— Kurdish hostility, which helped wreck the chances for a peaceful transition after the overthrow of Saddam. Subsequently, the forces at the disposal of sectarian groups challenged the divided and poorly disciplined new Iraqi army which was armed by the Americans. This challenge was particularly serious from the Mahdi Army of the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. American assumptions that Iraqis would welcome the invasion and that the exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves would ensure that the war could pay for itself proved seriously misplaced. The view that American ideology and technology would transcend Iraqi political culture was mistaken. The Bush Administration’s failure to predict the Iraqi response and the consequences in terms of an under-appreciation of strategy10 thus played a crucial role in turning apparent success into a serious ongoing problem. Successful in the conventional war, the USA had found it impossible to secure its regime change. The enmities and divisions within Iraqi society had been kept in check by the appalling rule of a vicious local secular despot, Saddam, but came to the fore under a democratically elected Iraqi government reliant on American support, although also willing to accept Shia sectarianism. Confidence that democracy was the solution, or the means to the solution, in the Middle East seemed at best flawed,11 and the Americans were soon pushed back into informal

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negotiations with insurgents and militias, as they tried to create a coalition for stability where the constituency for it was lacking. Rapid initial American success in Iraq in 2003, at first, led to talk of pressing on to attack other states that harboured terrorism and possibly were developing weapons of mass destruction, particularly Iran and Syria. However, it is more likely that the American failure to restore order in Iraq and the costs of that commitment (which by 2007 may well be 600 billion) will foster a measure of caution and lead to a reaction against interventionism and the jettisoning of the 2002 National Security Strategy (see pp. 209–10), at least insofar as the use of land forces is concerned. So far, North Korea has been dealt with via diplomacy. Indeed, American talk, in 2006–7, about possible action against Iran, which owed much to concern about its nuclear ambitious, focused on an air attack that was relied upon to do the job and wreck the nuclear programme. In a response to the problems of maintaining control in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an ironic commentary on the RMA and its belief in the possibility of substituting technology for numbers, the new Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, in January 2007 recommended an increase of 92,000 troops in the army and marines over the following five years. Although accentuated by the Middle Eastern crisis, not least due to the costs of American commitment and rises in the price of oil, a greater challenge to the American economy was posed by financial and economic strains. American economic activity, consumerism and openness to imports helped to drive industrial production elsewhere, especially to East Asia. In 2000, close to 40 per cent of Japanese car exports went to the USA, but Japan had by then been joined by South Korea, Taiwan and China as major sources of imports. The comparative advantage of cheap labour ensured that China in particular became very important as a source of manufactured goods, this proving a key means by which Chinese producers were integrated into the world economy. The resulting contrast was readily apparent in the computer industry, with the USA concentrating on higher-end machines and China on the cheap production of lower-end counterparts. As a result, in 2004, China became the leading world exporter of small, labour-intensive computers. Low costs led to major American investment in China and to a surge in imports, encouraged by the Chinese under-valuing of their currency. By 2004, overall imports from China were responsible for 2 per cent of the American GDP, and by 2005 the trade deficit with China was 202 billion; it was 190 billion alone in the first ten months of 2006. This helped China to manage its transition away from Communist economics, an American goal seen necessary for integrating China into the world economy, but also hit American manufacturing and was only manageable due to substantial net capital inflows. Trade and exchange rates proved key topics of debate when, in December 2006, the first of what is planned to be a twice-yearly ‘strategic economic dialogue’ between China and the USA was held in Beijing, a fit demonstration of a world that certainly did not centre in Europe and on European concerns. Chinese dependence on American markets helped ensure that the American economy continued to be the key sphere of world economic expansion. Capital inflows, in turn, increased American sensitivity to developments abroad. Since the dollar was the world’s principal reserve currency, the USA did not have to hold official reserves as large as those of other states. In 2005, it held only 2 per cent of world reserves, a small percentage given the size of the economy. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, all beneficiaries of the major economic growth of East

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Asia, each held considerably more. American interest rates were kept low in order to encourage growth and to ease the public mood, but Asian central banks still bought dollars in order to keep their own currencies low and thus aid their exports. Generally, cheap money eased borrowing and helped the USA to weather economic problems, without shifting too much of the burden onto middle America, not that those made unemployed would have agreed. Consumer borrowing drove economic growth. A strong dollar kept imports cheap, holding down the price of oil (which continued to be priced in dollars). In turn, cheap imports kept workers content with modest wage increases, helping American employers and thus limiting price inflationary pressures. By 2005, imports were responsible for about 37 per cent of domestic purchases of goods. As a result, the USA benefited from cheap Chinese labour, which acted as an alternative to greater American productivity in limiting inflation and without having to bear the social-welfare costs of having large numbers of Chinese workers and their dependents settle in the USA. In effect, American capital rented Chinese labour. No longer a low-wage economy, Japan lacked a comparable economic trajectory in the USA. Ironically, Japan invested in the USA in part in order to secure the benefits from cheap labour in the non-unionized South. Taking up the theme of alliances seen in this work, China and the USA have a key alliance of economic interest, part of it mediated by the super-market chain Wal-mart, a major importer of Chinese goods. As a reminder of the variety of views bound up in such abstractions as natural interests, American trade unionists, however, saw the poor conditions of Chinese workers, in terms of pay, social welfare and working conditions, as a cause of unfair and damaging competition. American wages were, as a result, restrained, while the profits of American companies rose considerably. The extent to which currency inflows are a matter of sustaining consumption—since 2000, foreigners, notably the Chinese Central Bank, have invested in bonds, especially treasury bonds, rather than in American companies as previously—is of particular concern, since this means a lack of underpinning for long-term economic growth. Furthermore, American corporate investment in future productivity, while greater than in Europe, is less than in East Asia. This is a serious problem for the USA, since it is linked to a lack of comparative advantage, which, combined with the size of the domestic economy, means that there is a shortage of exports to help service the foreign debt. As a reminder of the broadly based nature of policy, and the range of decision-makers, this debt was the product of heavy borrowing by individuals as well as government and companies. The looseness of monetary policy interacted with a willingness to borrow that reflected cultural suppositions about appropriate behaviour, just as higher savings ratios in Japan reflected a contrasting national culture. Economics is no more free from cultural factors than war or international relations. As a reminder of the complexity of indicators, the inflow of capital into the USA, however, was also a product of the creditworthiness of the economy and its underlying strengths. This was a matter of absolute and relative strengths. There was a sense that financial management was more open, and less susceptible to political pressures, than the situation in other large economies. This openness encouraged confidence in American assets and is a reminder of the extent to which great-power strength was a product of an alliance of constituencies of interest. Thus, in the sixteenth century, Spain, with its bullion flow from the New World, seemed a far better bet for foreign lenders than France.

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In 2006, the USA topped foreign direct investment, taking in 177 billion, ahead of Britain, France and China, which took 70 billion. The world total that year was 1.2 trillion. The alliance of interests permitted the financing of a massive American currentaccount deficit, 805 billion alone (6.4 per cent of GDP) in 2005. The current-account deficit rose to 225.6 billion in the third quarter of 2006. The gap between expenditure and what the economy produced put pressure on the dollar. This deficit was a sum that was made less formidable by major economic growth, which owed much to a continuing rise in productivity, but it was still more than 6 per cent of annual output, and, as such, twice the rate at its peak in the late 1980s; compared to 2.8 per cent for Britain, 0.1 per cent for the euro area, and surpluses that amounted to 7 per cent of GDP for China and 3.8 per cent for Japan. In December 2005, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the American Federal Reserve, pointed out that the ability to borrow to finance the currentaccount deficit suggested a flexibility in global capital markets that could be threatened by protectionism, but that, anyway, ‘deficits that culminate to ever-increasing net external debt, with its attendant rise in servicing costs, cannot persist indefinitely’. In July 2005, China not only revalued against the dollar but also announced that the yuan would no longer be pegged to the dollar, instead floating it against a number of currencies. If Chinese and other Asian reserves are not invested in the USA, this will make it more expensive for Americans to finance their current-account deficit. Indeed, the USA borrowed from China in order to help pay for the Iraq War. The challenge posed by these varied economic and financial issues raised a long-term question about America’s ability to continue to afford the growth in its military expenditure. This might seem to conform to the Paul Kennedy model, and in 1993 he had noted, ‘some critics of my discussion of US relative decline in Rise and Fall misread the text to conclude it referred to today rather than a generation hence’.12 Looked at differently, the problem for American power was as much a matter of the weaknesses of its ‘soft power’. The widespread unpopularity of American policies—for example, over climate change and the Middle East—weakened this ‘soft power’. Around the world, anti-Americanism, at least in terms of the policies and supposed goals of its government, was much on display—for example, at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina in November 2005—although much of the global anger may be directed more at President Bush than at the USA. The interventionism of the Bush Government enjoyed only limited international support. Its ideas, reiterated in the version of the National Security Strategy issued in March 2006, were the opposite of isolationism, and this was underlined in President Bush’s address to the United Nations in September 2005, in which he sought support in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. At the same time, this was multilateralism very much on American terms, and the notion that the mission defines the coalition and is determined by Washington destroyed any semblance of policy-making among allies. As so often in the history of great powers, strength and policy rotated round issues of alliance dynamics and their management rather than being a simple product of structural features. The next chapter provides an opportunity to look forward from the present, so this section will focus on considering the present in light of the recent past. It is appropriate to discuss the USA first as it is the leading power. The USA takes a leading role not because it is able to dominate the other powers (as might be implied by the word ‘hegemony’),

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but rather because, apart from its regional dominance of the Americas and the Pacific (the first of which is contested), it is the sole state able to play a part in regional situations around the world, a situation accentuated by the eastward extension of NATO and by an escalation of mission that in the mid-2000s took NATO forces into Afghanistan. Aside from the extent that any return of the USA to isolationism would therefore be a serious issue for other states, such a course is unlikely given America’s commitments, not least in the shape of energy dependency. This ensures an interest not only in the Middle East, but also, for example, in Central Asia and West Africa, where Nigeria, Cameroon and Angola are already important producers, and in Venezuela, which, by 2005, provided a seventh of America’s oil imports. Sensitivity over Venezuela contributed to the situation in which President Chávez blamed the USA for a coup against him in 2002. US involvement is unclear. If it was a factor, then the failure to remove Chávez can be seen as a blow to American plans. If energy dependency encouraged a new geopolitics, that is not the only source of the latter. The break-up of the Soviet Union led to much stronger American interest in Central Asia, as new alignments there seemed possible. Furthermore, ‘the War on Terror’ was responsible for concern about areas either as sources of terrorism, such as Afghanistan and Somalia, or as bases for action against it. The sense of a country under pressure might seem ironic given the size of the American economy, but a concern, often paranoid, about the supposed threat from outside forces has long been a major theme in American public culture, as in many other countries: for example, France and Russia. This concern is an important aspect of the xenophobia as nationalism that can be readily detected. Jobs are one of the touchstones of this sensitivity. They made concrete what might otherwise seem abstract. Globalization and free trade acted to strengthen the USA, by spreading its values and interests, but the terms of both created serious problems, not least as a result of deficit financing at governmental and personal levels. Furthermore, a lack of competitiveness was seen in important sectors of the American economy, including the iconic one of car manufacturing. In 1960, General Motors accounted for 60 per cent of the American market, and Ford and Chrysler for much of the rest, but, by 2003, Japanese, South Korean and German models were responsible for half the cars sold, and, by February 2006, General Motors’ share was only 23.4 per cent. This was a testimony to the appeal of the American market to foreign companies and investors, and many of the foreign models were anyway manufactured in the USA, but the impact on the collective psyche was important. Although such developments did not prevent America acting as a very assertive power in the 2000s, business competition contributed to the sense of the country under pressure. In 2005, hostility to the idea of Chinese control blocked a bid by CNOOG, a state-owned oil enterprise, for Unocal, a California oil company, and in 2006 there was vociferous and successful opposition to the sale of ports to a Dubai-based company. In the 2000s, concern in the USA was strengthened by large-scale immigration, both legal and illegal, and by the fall in the number of well-paid blue-collar jobs. Seen as a crucial American legacy, blue-collar jobs can also be regarded as high pay but low skill and, therefore, as unsustainable in the competitive international order that the USA sought (on terms) and also found itself increasingly part of, while yet unable to dictate the terms. This was very difficult to explain in terms of the populist ethos of public politics, and the problem contributed greatly to the sense of threat. The particular crisis stemming

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from the attacks of 11 September 2001 accentuated this tendency, by lending coherence and continuity to the notion of the enemy within and without. That there were indeed such enemies only served to anchor a much wider and more vaguely diffused sense of unease. It would have brought scant consolation to Americans, but an important aspect of the relative strength of the country can be found in the nature of their anxieties. For Americans, these frequently involved real or supposed threats to their personal position, but across much of the world the position of most individuals was far more precarious, certainly as far as personal safety and governmental and social constraints were concerned. There is no consolation, at least insofar as comparisons with other major states are concerned, when the American exceptionalism in sight is that of per-capita energy consumption or widespread obesity. However, as far as other major states are concerned, the USA is able to provide a high material standard of life, and, indeed, a poverty level that would be riches in much of the world. The development of a large middle class has been striking in both India and China and is an aspect of their integration into the world economy, but, in each country, there is a widespread poverty and serious pressures on resources, particularly water, which are more serious than in the USA. The provision of adequate infrastructure is also a serious problem in India, constraining economic activity and limiting social capital.

Power and social politics The compatibility of serious internal strains with great-power status is unclear and, indeed, should be an issue when discussing China, India and Brazil. For example, there has always been a strong regional dimension to Chinese history, and recent years have been no exception. Economic expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s was particularly apparent in coastal areas of the south, while government remained in the north. Resulting economic differences led to significant internal migration and to problems in meeting the resource demands of the booming regions, especially for food and water, without causing shortages and price rises elsewhere. It is unclear how far such strains will affect the character of Chinese power, forcing it to devote appreciable efforts to social control and leading possibly to a militarization of authority as a result, but, in the mid-2000s, the benefits of expansion appeared to be spreading more generally in China. Allowing for differences in circumstances and in national culture, the same questions arise for India and other states. Globalization brings work-forces into the world economy, helping reduce inflationary pressures but with very different benefits for the newly integrating powers. Past patterns of social compliance and control are little guide to the present situation, not least because of the rapidity of social change of late, with, in particular, large-scale internal migration, especially to the cities. This reflects the movement of labour from agriculture to industry and services, a process already seen in Europe, the USA and Japan but one dependent on the availability of new jobs. The processes of alliance that underlie authority and consent are difficult to assess, and they tend only to be considered in circumstances of political breakdown, but this is unhelpful. In particular, it is not necessarily the case that such processes are any slower to change than the political issues that tend to engage attention. When the bulk of the

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world’s population lived on the land, engaged in agriculture, lacked formal education or literacy and was subject to stronger patterns of social and ideological control, then the stability of the social order and related structures and ideas of coherence might well have been high, but these factors no longer pertain to the same extent and are of diminishing effect. As a result, it is necessary to assess social politics when assessing the situation in China, India and other states that have been considered for possible great-power status. Internal political divisions are a clearer issue for the EU, the body created from the European Community by the Treaty on European Union signed at Maastricht in 1992. The EU successfully expanded to include not only Austria, Finland and Sweden, all of which joined in 1995, but also much of the ex-Communist eastern Europe, reaching twenty-seven member countries in 2007. In 1999, the euro was launched as a trading currency for much of the EU, notes and coin following in 2002. By 2007, it was legal tender in thirteen of the EU countries. However, although the expansion in the world economy in the early 1990s and the early 2000s helped the EU, GDP growth did not match that in the USA, let alone growth in East Asia. Western Europe’s ability to compete as an exporter was helped by productivity growth but was adversely affected by higher labour costs and by expensive social-welfare systems, while the fiscal consequences of the unification of West and East Germany in 1990 seriously hit the West German economy and public finances, although by 2007 projected German economic growth was impressive. Investment in western Europe rose less than in the USA or East Asia. The net effect of limited growth across much of western Europe was a rise in unemployment and pressure from extremist political parties. Nevertheless, there was recovery in the 2000s. In 2006, thanks to exports, Germany achieved growth of 3.7 per cent, and, partly thanks to that, per-capita GDP growth was faster in the euro area than in the USA. On the international scale, the EU sought soft power through multinational institutions such as the UN and the World Trade Organization. There was also criticism of the use of force unless in the service of humanitarian intervention, as in Kosovo in 1999. The resulting form and use of power ensured that the EU was very different, in its power mood and mode, to those of other major powers. This led to criticism from American commentators and also to a degree of uncertainty about the long-term prospects of the EU as an international player in power politics. The Bosnia and Kosovo crises, indeed, exposed the military limits of the EU and its dependence on the USA. A widespread unwillingness to spend on defence reflected a misleading EU confidence that it will be possible to be more influential than the USA, precisely because the EU is more reliant on diplomacy than force. Ironically, this is an approach that depends on an underpinning of American strength.13 Tension between the approaches, possibly more than competing goals, created problems for both the USA and the EU. A need to consider social politics is also true when looking at the current great power, the USA. There, the terms of the alliances that keep the political system operating successfully are very much set by a democratic culture that is unwilling to hear difficult home-truths. Instead, American public opinion prefers to believe not simply in an entitlement derived from national exceptionalism but also in a right to material wellbeing at a far from basic level, irrespective of individual abilities or international circumstances. The consequences can be seen in terms of an unwillingness to accept

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higher energy prices and in the failure of the peacetime wage and price controls imposed in 1971 and finally ended in 1974. Such assumptions create pressures to which governments have to respond. At present, across the world, growing democratization, in terms of expectations that democracy means an accountability greater than that gained from occasional elections, makes these pressures more acute. This pressure ensures that international hegemony, if it exists, has to be understood, in part as the interaction of states each of which is greatly affected by domestic politics, whatever the formal nature of the constitutional process. The impact of these politics on foreign policy is direct as well as inherent. The USA has little sympathy with the constraints of collective security, especially with the United Nations, but finds it repeatedly necessary to make deals with other states in order to forward its interests. American politicians and public opinion, nevertheless, continue instinctively to think in unilateral terms, as a key aspect of a nationalist democracy that to others can appear aggressive. For example, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of the Department of Defense included as a goal the conduct of operations by Special Operations Forces (SOF) in countries with which the USA is not at war. This is seen as a way to pursue the ‘long war’ against terrorism, and has a recent tradition,14 but it is not an approach with which many allies are happy, not least because it raises issues about the legitimacy of policy. In this review, the proposed increase in the SOF was significant, and it is envisaged that these forces will become about 66,000 strong by 2011, a figure equivalent to that of many medium-sized armies. This reflects the American perception of terrorism as an external challenge, which it largely is for the USA, whereas, in Europe, it is more generally seen as a threat that is domestic, particularly in the shape of radicalized Muslim sectors of society, as well as international. The domestic nature of the threat poses far more complex issues of containment, control and conflict than those faced by the USA, but that is not accepted by many American commentators. America has a political culture that is hostile to compromise with foreign states, which helps ensure that many commentators are apt to use the term ‘hyper-power’ or empire to describe the USA.15 The notion of American exceptionalism does not encourage the exigencies of compromise nor the idea that the response of others can, or should, play a major role in ensuring legitimacy for American policies, while the history of American foreign policy is that of American leadership and, thus, does not lead to an interpretation of alliances as based on mutual needs.16 Indeed, American politicians argue that Congress can supersede treaty obligations. The 2006 agreement for civilian nuclear cooperation with India, in conscious defiance of the provision of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that such benefits should not flow to states that develop nuclear weapons, was typical of a preference for a ‘realist’ bilateral advantage over an ‘idealist’ multilateral system that might make it easier to win wider support. In this case, American action made a mockery of attempts to limit proliferation. As in other states, domestic pressures in the USA will ensure tensions with the external constraints that alliance policy-making entails. Whether the alliance is formal or not, these constraints, however, have become more important to the USA due to the marked increase in cash inflows. Dependence on foreign support for the dollar helps ensures that American strength rests on an implicit international alliance. That is the reality of its current hegemonic position, while compromise can be seen in its treatment of North Korea.

10 Into the future Claims made both in the shadow of atomic weaponry and in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War about the obsolescence of warfare now seem curious and naïve. On the one hand, the transformation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq into an imbroglio that defies ready resolution strengthened scepticism in the USA and Britain about the effectiveness of interventionism. On the other, however, the continued extent of conflict in Africa in the 2000s underlines the extent to which reliance on force remains habitual. At a different level, the military build-up of the major East and South Asian powers, China, Japan and India, a build-up that also encouraged active procurement by other regional powers, such as Malaya, Pakistan and Taiwan, reflected a sense that force was a key deterrent and conflict an ever-present possibility. As far as these and other regional states were concerned, there was an emphasis not on numbers of troops but on advanced weaponry, a pattern repeated with the high level of military investment in the Middle East. If the problems facing coalition, and subsequently government, forces in Iraq after the invasion of 2003 indicated the limitations of the military for regime-sustaining and peacekeeping, the investment in advanced weaponry in East and South Asia reflected a confidence in the value of, or at least need for, such investment for state protection against potential attack by conventional forces. On the other hand, some historians and political scientists point to trends that may make major conventional wars less likely in the future. Two stand out, one material and one cultural. First, in an argument also made prior to the First World War, the growing interconnectedness of the world economy raises the stakes of potential conflicts and therefore encourages peaceful solutions to disputes so as not to damage valuable trade links. Especially for a growing economy such as that of China, which is dependent on foreign investment, markets, raw materials and energy sources, such calculations may prove crucial in policy decisions. Second is the so-called ‘democracy effect’, with the claim that truly democratic polities have never gone to war with each other. While one can quibble about definitions and qualifications, there does seem to be a tendency here, though possibly not what can be seen as a law of historical development. The slow, but steady, spread, in the 1990s and early 2000s, of democratic institutions, governments and related cultural assumptions (not unconnected to the spread of market mechanisms in the global economy), is thus, perhaps, a hopeful sign for the decreased frequency of state-to-state war. Nevertheless, it is unclear that a positive approach to populist politics is necessarily appropriate, not least given the pressures to which populist states may be prone, including publics affected by a crisis of living standards.

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Environmental challenges Neither trend, anyway, addresses directly the many and varied causes of sub-state and non-state violence, whose cultural complexities resist simple, formulaic solutions. Nor is either trend immune to possible reversals if the contexts that have encouraged them— above all the spread of economic development and a concomitant rise in personal standards of living—disappear. A worldwide environmental crisis brought on by catastrophic consequences of global warming could create just such a changed context, ensuring that competition for suddenly scarce resources, especially water, increases and is valued above cooperation. Already, naval expenditure in the East and South Asia owes much to confrontations over offshore oil reserves that reflects competing territorial claims. A key question about the future indeed relates to the impact of environmental factors. They may well demonstrate, far more dramatically than in the past, the role of external constraints on the great powers and on whatever system they are held to constitute, although it would be mistaken to underwrite the role of environmental constraints in the past, not least as they affected food and labour availability. Furthermore, political changes themselves affect the environment, with Chinese domestic policies from the 1980s leading to an economic growth that pushed up the burning of fossil fuels, while, conversely, Soviet collapse in the 1990s greatly reduced greenhouse-gas emissions.1 Changes to these external constraints also are scarcely new, as both were clearly demonstrated in the nineteenth century with the impact of steam-driven manufacturing and transport and also the overcoming of the food-population parameters discussed by Thomas Malthus. Indeed, these nineteenth-century changes hitherto have been more significant for the major powers than the more recent affect of environmental pressures. That, however, is no necessary guide to the future, not least because the rate of environmental change is particularly high and is cumulative in effect. This is especially seen with global warming. That has both general consequences, in terms of the movement of growing zones, and more specific ones, such as the prospect of a sea passage to the north of Canada, a North-West Passage, as the Arctic ice recedes. Warming and water shortages may well not simply affect economic strength but also cause more serious crises. The 1999 Global Environment Outlook report of the UN Environment Programme discussed the possibility of ‘water wars’ in north and southwest Asia in the first quarter of this century.2 Warming and water shortages will probably accelerate large-scale population movements, a process that also can be seen in earlier periods. The possible relationship between environmental change and epidemics may well also be highly significant. At the same time, there is plenty of room for active human responses to resource problems—for example, bio-engineering. Consciousness of environmental change was a feature of Paul Kennedy’s instructive Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (1993) and has since become far more pronounced,3 but that does not make clear how best to integrate it into great-power analysis. Some problems will be discounted because they will confront all the major powers, but that is not true of all such challenges. Furthermore, the problems and issues created by environmental issues will also hit lesser powers, creating opportunities and

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difficulties for their major counterparts. Thus, water wars, for example in North-East Africa between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, may lead to intervention by major powers concerned about shifts among regional actors. These and other strains may encourage conflict. It is unclear whether the comparable competition for resources between the great powers will have a similar impact. As oil and other raw materials come into shorter supply, it is probable, instead, that surrogate struggles will be mounted via client and allied movements and, thus, that the methods of the Cold War will be revived in order to stage the resource war. The latter, however, will lack the degree of alignment and coherence created by the ideological dimension of the Cold War. Instead, it is more likely that the absence of such a dimension, and the presence of a number of major powers competing for resources, will create shifting alignments. At present, the key players seem likely to be the USA and China, with India, Japan, Russia and, despite its growing structural weaknesses, the EU occupying the second tier. This leaves unclear the future role of states such as Brazil, but no other state seems likely to be able to match India, which, by 2035 may be the most populous state, although its high rate of poverty is a potential challenge to social and political stability. That such a challenge has not occurred in the past is no necessary indicator for the future, although the cultural patterns that lessen tension within India have a strong grip. Despite its resources riches, Russia is in absolute or relative decline, not least in demographic terms: the population by the mid-2000s was falling annually by 0.75 million. As a result, Russia depends on immigration, most of it from parts of the former Soviet Union. This helps make the growth of radical Islam a particular challenge to Russia. Far from being restricted to the intractable problems of the North Caucasus, where a Chechen-led jihad has destabilized neighbouring areas, this issue is a more general problem for Russian stability.4 Japan’s declining population also challenges its position. Such a decline creates problems in terms of supporting the burden of an increasingly ageing society but also raises the issue of the relationship between power status and per-capita productivity. The latter is seen as particularly important by states with declining population, but also by a USA concerned about the rising overall productivity of China and India. In addition, the rise in Chinese and Indian per-capita productivity is a challenge for the USA due to their greater population size. Issues created by the declining population of much of Europe are accentuated by difficulties in assimilating immigrants, many of whom, especially if Muslim, form distinct communities that do not accept the value systems of their host countries. Moreover, in any list of major powers, the place of Britain, France and Germany, separate to the EU, is unclear. At present, the first two display many of the characteristics of imperial powers and have important legacy roles.5 The relative economic position of Britain may have fallen, but the national wealth has risen. So has that of other powers, but, as Britain covers most of its military roles as part of multilateral alliances, this is not as serious as it might have appeared a century ago. The impact of environmental change on this list of major powers is unclear. At present, it seems improbable that environmental change will affect great-power status, but, aside from the possibility of cataclysmic outcomes, it is probable that such changes will lead to pressures on the social cohesion that affect political strength and the ability to act. For example, as inexpensive and immediately accessible energy has been internalized and made normative in the assumptions of Western life, especially in the USA, its

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removal will cause great stress and lead to a demand for action and a search for culprits. This will be particularly true from economically marginal groups whose living standards are already under serious pressure, such as the rural poor. However, such marginality may extend to all those whose socio-economic position is precarious, including industrial workers and others threatened by global competition. A limited willingness to accept the consequences of global shifts in energy prices, as well as the power of the state to set related tax levels, is already evident: for example, in Britain in 2000 and Nigeria in 2003. The political process will channel such anxiety and anger, leading to confrontation and conflict, expressed in terms of extremist political movements, contentious internal regulation and international disputes. Thus, resources may be the cause or occasion for conflict and, whether the state, region or social group that is the aggressor is experiencing economic growth or the reverse. Resource demands will also have an effect on the exchange rates and liquidity of currencies. Indeed, power rivalry in the future may focus on such measures. Social cohesion is likely to be put under pressure from the strains of differential development within states. The rate of divergence will rise with the pace of technological and economic change, and attempts to use social welfare in order to temper the resulting pressures will only have limited impact. In part, these attempts will reflect expectations of collective progress and individual rights to prosperity, expectations that bear no reference to the contribution made. At the global level, there will be pressure from population increase. This provides a Malthusian vista of conflict derived from numbers exceeding resources, while also, as in Palestine, ensuring a large percentage of young men able to fuel conflict. Birth rates in many countries are falling, and aggregate global population growth is expected to fall after mid-century, but the intervening growth is still seen as formidable. The 1999 UN Population Fund Study suggested a rise from 6 billion people in 1999 to 8.9 in 2050. These figures reflect not only the entry into fertility of current children but also improvements in public health and medical care that lead to a rise in average life expectancy, as well as the continuation in many countries of cultural restraints on restricting family size and the use of contraception. This rise in population has tremendous resource implications which are accentuated by the extent to which expectations of rising living standards are characteristic of many of the regions of most rapidly growing population. Rising per-capita wealth is both cause and consequence of economic growth and development, and in 2000–6 the world economy grew at an annual per-capita rate of 3.2 per cent, but, in contrast to the general thrust of economics-based accounts of political power, such growth is also a cause of instability. This is because, despite important and continuing technological improvements in productive efficiency, especially the amount of water or fuel used in manufacturing, economic growth poses major resource demands. Rising demand for goods and opportunities will increase volatility in many states, and this will be especially so in those that cannot ensure both high growth rates and the widespread distribution of the benefits of growth, or, conversely, dampen or control expectations. These demands will accentuate problems of political management within, as well as between, states, encouraging the politics of grievance and redistribution. Despite their growth rates, this may become a problem for China and India. In many states, especially, but not only, in post-independence Latin America, subSaharan Africa and Oceania, the prime purpose of the military will therefore continue to

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be internal control, with the army, in particular, as the arm of the state. This was driven brutally home in Operation Murambatsvina, launched in 2005 by Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe, which involved the destruction of the homes or businesses of about 700,000 people. In late 2006, Evo Morales, the left-wing President of Bolivia, warned that he might use the army to overcome opposition in the prosperous east as it reached for autonomy in response to his expropriatory plans. At the same time, the Turkish military threatened to invade Iraqi Kurdistan in order to prevent support from there for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in its violent resistance to Turkish control. Since 2004, there has also been Kurdish resistance to Iran in the section of the latter where Kurds live. However, the difficulties faced by military control led Pakistan’s military president, Pervez Musharraf, in September 2006, to agree to abandon operations against Islamic fundamentalists in the federally administered tribal areas near the Afghan border. Mounted from 2001, and using 80,000 troops, those operations had failed to contain opposition, let alone impose order. The local power proved less effective in enforcing control in Waziristan than the British, with grave difficulties, had managed to be in the 1930s. This reflected a range of circumstances, not least that modern expectations of what control means are higher. Ethnic differences frequently act as a spur for division6 and serve as a reminder of the difficulties of constructing nationhoods that rest on an inclusive basis. In China, 93 per cent of whose population is Han, the expression of separatist views is not permitted. In Myanmar (Burma), the army-ruled state uses force against minority peoples who defy its power, such as the Karens. In Sri Lanka, in contrast, the opposition Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam, with their quest for a Tamil homeland in the Sinhalese-majority island, are the major cause of violence and instability, although the intransigence of their opponents does not help. As a reminder of the extent to which high levels of violence could exist in supposedly peaceful scenarios, over 3,500 people were killed in conflict in Sri Lanka in 2006, despite the negotiation of a ceasefire in 2002. At a different scale, although again indicating the role of ethnic division as part of the reasons for internal conflict, it is pertinent to consider a part of the world that is generally omitted from history, Oceania, the islands of the Pacific. They play a major role when discussing conflict between Japan and the USA in the Second World War but are subsequently ignored. The situation, however, in the region became more unstable as imperial presences were dismantled. Internal disputes over jobs and other opportunities were exacerbated by economic problems, and the resulting disagreements led to a high level of tension in which violence became common and sapped any sense of security. The results were endemic strife, as in Papua New Guinea, where armed gangs of unemployed men challenge social order. In the Solomon Islands, serious ethnic conflicts led to a coup in 2000, the year in which there was also an attempted coup in Fiji that included a bloody, but unsuccessful, army mutiny. In 2006, rioting and conflict between police and army led to a collapse of security in East Timor, while a coup occurred in Fiji. Paradoxically, this disorder led former imperial powers to send troops and police back into Oceania, although the emphasis was on the regional imperial powers and not on Britain, while the USA preferred to rely on these regional powers. This reflected not so much the overstretch of an over-engaged empire, although that factor was pertinent, as the correct sense that regional allies would be offended if they were not left in command. The close links between the American and Australian governments also indicated that

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overstretch was not the pertinent concept, as, instead, there was burden-sharing within an imperial alliance system presided over by a hegemonic power. In 2006, Australian and New Zealand troops and police were sent into East Timor, the Solomon Islands and Tonga to try to preserve civil order. Crucially, however, the Australian government ruled out military intervention on Fiji. In part, there is a widespread overlap in Oceania between politics, disorder and civil conflict, an overlap that can also be seen elsewhere. Thus, in Bangladesh, the two main political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, compete violently as well as electorally, with mob violence, strikes, targeted assassinations and politicized judicial decisions, all part of the process. This leads to the distribution of weapons, especially staves, which are used in street battles, while politicians wear battleproof vests. This level of violence threatens to move from politics by other means to a subversion of politics, as in 2004 when the leader of the Bangladesh opposition was nearly killed by a grenade attack at an election rally. In 2006, the opposition blockaded Dhaka, the capital, as a response to reported attempts to rig the forthcoming election. As a result, the government instructed the army to maintain order. In January 2007, in turn, the army took power behind an interim government, declared a state of emergency and cancelled the election. In Palestine in 2007, there was violent tension between the Islamist Hamas movement and the secular Fatah movement, with differences over the role of religion interacting with political and clan rivalries. Despite the general focus in Western commentary on the Middle East, Africa has been the most violent part of the world since 1989. In part, as with the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia,7 and the Rwandan invasion of Congo, there was a state-to-state aspect to conflict there; but much of it was within states or, as with Rwanda and Congo, a situation in which the combatants were not so much states as ethnic groups. This had obvious consequences for the characteristics of warfare, and thus for the ability of major powers to seek to control developments. Much of the warfare was limited, decentred and decentralized, with unconventional conflict being crucial. The combatants were not usually regular troops, or were only regular insofar as the state had been annexed by one of the ethnic groups. The ‘totality’ of war was underlined by the large-scale use of child soldiers, for example by insurrectionary movements in Nepal (the Maoists), Sudan and Uganda, and by warlords in Liberia.8 Tactics and strategy in this context could be genoicidal or at least linked to the destruction of the rival society by, for example, forced migration. A prime instance was that of the conflict in the Darfur region of west Sudan in 2004–7. In this, the Janjaweed, an Arab militia with, at the very least, the connivance of the Government and the backing of the Army, attacked the black, mostly Muslim, population, killing large numbers, destroying their settlements, seizing their livestock and encouraging a flight of refugees into neighbouring Chad. Conflict therefore spread into Chad, with the Government of Sudan backing rebels in Chad. In Darfur, large-scale rape was an integral part of the violent attack on the local society, as was the mutilation of women. The government forces also used air attacks. By late 2006, about 300,000 people had been killed or died as a consequence of the conflict, while over 2 million had been driven from their homes. Civil society had totally collapsed in Darfur. Aside from government brutality, banditry became widespread. Sudan’s oil sales, largely to China which takes four-fifths of the oil exports, helped finance the repression, and this made it difficult to exert concerted

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international pressure. As far as other states were concerned, the Darfur crisis showed the limits of great-power capability and interest. In southern Sudan, moreover, a long-standing conflict that lasted for most of the period after independence in 1956, between the Muslim, Arab government and the Christian and animist population of the south, ended in 2005 after a civil war that had led to at least 2 million dead. Control by the north was linked to energy supplies as most of the oil reserves are in the south. Despite the peace agreement, which was supposed to allow autonomy to the regional government of south Sudan, the north continued in 2005– 6 to exploit oil in the south, using troops to drive out local people. Larger-scale conflict between northern and southern militias resumed in late 2006. Conflict of this type, if small-scale, could, in part, be supported by looting and expropriation, but larger-scale sustained conflict posed supply problems, not least due to the logistical limitations of the combatant forces and the poverty of much of the land being contested. As a consequence, key funding was frequently supplied by the sale of raw materials that had international value. To that extent, these wars were an aspect of the global economy, as conflict so frequently was. Thus, in Angola in the 1990s, the civil war was largely supported on the government side by the sale of oil and on that of the rebel UNITA movement by the sale of diamonds. As a result, attacks on oil pipelines and refineries became a stock-in-trade of rebel movements, as in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The sale of diamonds was also important in the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa in the 2000s. There, the overlap between violence and criminality was readily apparent. These conflicts wound down in the early 2000s. Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA leader, was killed in February 2002, and the loss of the leader was rapidly followed by the signature of a peace agreement. In 2003, the Liberian government of Charles Taylor, which had supported rebels in three neighbouring states, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast, was forced to step down. By 1999, 95 per cent of the rise in the global population was occurring in ‘developing countries’, whose populations were increasingly conscious of their relative deprivation. The disruptive effects of population increase will be accentuated by migration. This already poses major issues of adaptation for societies receiving such migrants, with associated social tension. As a symbolic echo of the slave trade, although very different, as slavery is not involved, it is pertinent to note the current large-scale movement of Africans to Europe, particularly Spain. Most have come from West Africa in search of work and a key means is by boat to the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession, where they seek asylum. Crossing in open boats, they are exposed to the sun and are generally short of water. In 2006, the Red Cross estimated that one boat in four sank on the journey. The sight of Africans in open boats being intercepted by the Spanish Navy in an attempt to keep them from the European economy invites attention to the varied relationship between globalization and movement for work, with a coda about the different role of naval power compared to that of the nineteenth-century British Navy. Global warming may well speed the movement of Africans into Europe as it will hit the availability of water in North Africa and the Sahel. The impact of environmental pressures and changes invites the question whether the effects of humans’ actions on the context in which they operate may not be more direct in the sense of activity in outer space. This opens up the prospect not simply of exploration but also of enhanced military capability, mineral extraction and possibly settlement.

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Whether that would offer a solution to problems on Earth possibly belongs to the field of science fiction, but consideration of the issue reflects not so much utopianism as a reaction to the grave problems of the human condition.

A clash of civilizations? Environmental pressures do not say much about the ‘clash of civilizations’ discerned, in the 1990s and 2000s, in a clash between the West and radical Islam and prefigured with the Iranian revolution of 1979.9 Interest in this clash reflected the popularity of the big idea, also seen in the response to Kennedy’s thesis. Radical Islam has, indeed, become far more assertive, helping exacerbate tensions in a range of disputes: for example, between India and Pakistani-backed separatism in Kashmir. The religious complexion to such disputes makes it harder to secure compromise solutions. Furthermore, radical Islam actively rejected the character and content of American culture and economic and political systems and thus challenged the assumptions and equations of American power. As the resilience of religion, despite secularist analyses, assumptions and policies, has been one of the major themes of the past two decades, it is likely that religion will also remain important to the agenda and context of domestic politics, state identity and international relations over the century. Aside from the role of religion in identity politics, religious identity and antagonism help overcome restraints against violence, while, thanks to both proselytism and different birth rates among religious groups, confessional relations are generally dynamic and, thus, unstable. Just as emphasis on the role of ideology in the Cold War10 has to consider the complicating and altering features of Sino-Soviet and Sino-American relations, so the notion of a clash of civilizations underestimates tensions within Islam. Indeed, the likely consequences of the politics of the 2000s include not only stronger tension between the West and radical Islam but also a marked upsurge in violence between Shias and Sunnis. In addition, there are other major differences and tension within the analytical building blocks employed for atomizing both the Islamic world and the West.11 Furthermore, the problem of relating all conflicts to a supposed clash of civilizations is demonstrated in the far south of Thailand where Muslim separatists are seen as resisting a pro-Western government. That element is certainly present in a conflict that has been ongoing since 2004, with over 1,700 people killed, but other elements are involved. In the long term, they relate to the problems of absorbing a largely Malay-speaking Muslim people annexed in 1902 by a Thai-speaking Buddhist state, but, in the short-term, there are issues of military brutality, which played a major role in the upsurge of tension in late 2004 in which troops fired on demonstrators as well as possible exploitation by drug barons and politicians. In Spain in 2004, in Britain in 2005, and in India in 2006, major terrorist attacks were launched against public-transport systems by Muslim groups, but that does not mean that a majority of Muslims supported this violence. The relationship between the clash of civilizations and globalization is left unclear if the former is treated as a product of the latter or, indeed, as a consequence of antiAmericanism. Radical Islam appeals to those with exposure to globalization but few of its benefits. However, although globalization may be seen by critics as a Western, indeed, American project—both goal and process, not least due to the role of American-based

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multinationals, that underplays the extent of other players in shaping globalization, understood as an integration of economic markets and a commitment to free-market policies.12 As earlier with what is termed ‘the creation of modernity’,13 this is not simply a matter of the agency of those otherwise acted upon but also of other forces and states taking their own initiatives. Indeed, globalization is both expression of the shared advantages represented by links and alliances and also cause and consequence of the very different benefits and problems they entail. Moreover, with the largest portion of the world’s population living in East and South Asia, it may be unconvincing to see antiAmericanism as the key theme in any future clash of civilizations, as that downplays the prospect of rivalry in the region.

The Asian question Indeed, the possibility of confrontation between China and India may be more significant. Greater prosperity, combined with population growth, will help increase Chinese and Indian dependence on imports, particularly of oil, and thus their sensitivity to the availability and distribution of resources. It is unclear whether the two powers will learn how to operate, balance and advance their interests within the international community, as powers seeking a stable position generally find most appropriate, or whether they will strive for advantage in a fashion that elicits opposing actions and, possibly, war. This takes up earlier uncertainty about how Japan would adapt to greater power, an uncertainty in which it is necessary to give due weight to the role of values as well as of examples.14 These indicate that the nature and objectives of regional power, indeed hegemony, and its relationship with the global situation, can vary greatly. Powerful states, such as China, India and Russia, expect to dominate their neighbours and do not appreciate opposition to this aspiration, as Russia has demonstrated in the Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s—for example, in its aggressive policy towards Georgia. This drive for domination is made more dangerous by the relationship between regional hegemony and control over frontier areas, for each of these major powers has serious problems with opposition in the latter—for example, Kashmir for India—and political circumstances make it implausible that they will back down. That the three states are neighbours, moreover, helps ensure a competitive quality even to alliances. Thus, aggressive Sino-Russian cooperation in the 2000s, not least due to shared concern about the USA, was matched by tension over competing interests, particularly relations with India, in Central Asia, over energy resources, and in the Russian Far East. Having originally devised and sought to implement both containment and engagement strategies against the Soviet Union, the USA has also recently sought to apply them with China. The latter’s fast-paced military development definitely poses a capability threat, not only to its neighbours but also further afield. This was demonstrated in 2006–7, with clear signs of an intention to offset American advantages, seen in particular with the development of the Chinese navy and of the capability for space warfare demonstrated in January 2007 when the Chinese deliberately shot down one of their own weather satellites in what was a major warning about the long-term effectiveness of American spy satellites. In December 2006, President Hu Jintao promised to build the navy up so that it was ready for ‘military struggles… at any time’. China has agreed to purchase from

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Russia eight kilo-class nuclear submarines equipped with 5,000-mile-range missiles. Already, a Chinese nuclear submarine has showed itself off Tokyo.15 On land, China is developing ground-launched cruise missiles, as well as the road-mobile Donfeng-31 A which is able to reach the USA. This is a clear challenge to the latter and one that reflects a determination to use resources to alter the global balance of power. Indeed the Ghina— USA relationship appears a good demonstration of the Kennedy thesis, although intent in the case of China is difficult to assess, not least because Chinese military policies and plans are far from public or transparent. This situation encourages a probably misleading treatment of China in the structural terms of models of international behaviour.16 China’s willingness to encourage and support resource-rich states opposed to the USA, such as Iran, Sudan and Myanmar (Burma), indicates its drive for resources and its willingness to back highly questionable regimes to that end. China’s quest for resources ensured that, in 2003, it became the second-largest oil importer, and, by 2006, consumed a third of the world’s coal and a quarter of its steel and was the leading consumer of copper, rubber, tin and zinc. Reserve capacity in many commodities was exhausted and, as a result, world prices rose rapidly. For China, this growing need for resources raises issues of resource security, which are pursued not only by a military build-up but also by an active process of international engagement, particularly with Russia. The Shanghai Co-Operation Organization of Russia, China and the Central Asian republics was also designed to circumvent American containment, particularly in Central Asia and to help China exploit Central Asian oil and gas. This poses problems for the USA, not only for defence but also in terms of the nonmilitary response.17 The Shanghai Co-Operation Organization is also a focus for antiAmerican sentiment in the Islamic world, as, in June 2006, when President Ahmadinejad of Iran, an observer state, pressed for countering American energy diplomacy in Asia. For the USA, the anarchy represented by failed states may pall as a challenge when compared to the problems posed by highly successful ones. The American 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review referred to China as having the ‘greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States’. The ability to intervene to protect Taiwan against Chinese pressure has thus become a more testing indicator of American resolve and capability. This can be seen as making urgent the continued planning for effectiveness in conventional warfare and also in the shift of American nuclear capability, so that, by 2006, nearly 65 per cent of their sea-launched ballistic missiles were deployed in the Pacific maritime region.18 Such a deployment offers a prospect of destroying much or all of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, which, in turn, can be seen as a destabilizing capability. Moreover, the ability of the USA to ensure Chinese restraint, either through its own efforts or through coalitions, is unclear. The latter will require support in the multipolar Asia-Pacific system, not least from India and Japan, but it is uncertain how far their objectives will coincide with those of the USA. From the American perspective, Japan is more encouraging as an ally, not only as a base for American forces but also supporting American action towards China, particularly over Taiwan. If Chinese capability and development suggests the most obvious prospect of a new great power, there are also military developments that pose a more general challenge to the USA. In particular, the use of solid-propelled ballistic missiles makes rapid launches possible. States with programmes for solid-propellant, submarine-launched ballistic missiles now include India, Iran and Pakistan, while cruise missiles with greater ranges

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that can be launched from ships are also a credible threat.19 Thus, the sea, a leading site of American power and force projection during the Cold War and subsequently, has become a zone for confrontation. No other state can match the strength of the American nuclear arsenal, but it is unclear how far the wide-spread availability of nuclear armaments will act as a deterrent, vitiating the advantages offered by this arsenal. Similarly, Chinese military activity, not least actual or potential force projection into areas unaccustomed to it, such as the Indian Ocean, or the development of a policy of protecting Chinese sealanes, leads or will lead to distrust by other powers, not only the USA but also, for example, India, Australia, Japan and Thailand. This pushes forward the prospects for American containment strategies. Civilizations are not synonymous with great powers, nor can the latter necessarily be seen as their leading exponents, however much such a view may be attractive for their self-image. The concept of a clash of civilizations may take on most value in the last context, that of images, which makes its advocacy by a prominent American political scientist particularly pertinent. Globalization, in contrast, captures a more central reality, not least in terms of weapons technology. Thanks to rockets, the world can, indeed, become a single battlefield, and the extension of military capability into space has likely consequences for future great-power confrontations.20 Moreover, the ability of relatively minor states, such as North Korea and Iran, to reach or come close to nuclear capability makes them a serious threat. These developments constitute a marked shift from the great-power conflicts that culminated in 1945, while the new capability of North Korea and Iran is an important post-Cold War change. This invites discussion of the validity, for current circumstances, of consideration of earlier great powers. Does strategic overreach in the age of Philip II of Spain have much to offer for a consideration of the situation today or in the future? The answer is yes, because, although effects alter, causes are more lasting. The key causes are located in human nature, emotions and self-perception. The problems these pose for collective action are greatly affected, if not transformed, by technological, social, economic and political change, but, at the level of decision-making, changes are far less profound.

11 Conclusions Resting great-power status on economic strength captures the extent to which the material characteristics of power are, indeed, related to economic capability. From this, however, it does not follow that these material characteristics define power itself, nor determine its use, nor the effectiveness of this use. Instead, accepting the inherent perils of grand, overarching constructs, it is necessary to take a much more multifaceted approach to power. In particular, it is important to consider what encourages consent and cooperation both in creating and in operationalizing power. Consent and cooperation should be understood in the widest sense. They include, for example, a willingness to trade as well as to accept authority. Thus, the British, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were centrally concerned with authority or control over trade and sea; and colonial rule was only one aspect of a more general thrust for activity as much as dominance. An openness to trade was what the British sought across much of the world, and this access was not seen as resting on force.1 There is also a need to include ‘soft’ power, not least the spread of cultural suppositions. From this perspective, Spain was very much a great power from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century because Spanish rule had served as a context within which the indigenous population of much of the Americas was converted to Christianity. This did not end tensions, as a number of risings, such as that of Túpac Amaru in Peru in 1780–1, showed, but it did make it easier to control Spanish America. In particular, whatever the level of internal discontent, the relative cohesion brought by the cultural spread of Spanish power helped make it very difficult for foreign powers to penetrate Spanish America. Cultural factors alone were not responsible for this. The hostile environment was also very important in strengthening military defences. What was notable, at any rate, was that a series of British attempts, for example against Cartagena in 1741 and Buenos Aires in 1807, met very little success despite the respective strength of the two military-industrial systems. The British captured Havana in 1762, but they were unable to achieve the desired overthrow of the Spanish empire, and the creation of a new pro-British group of independent states willing to trade with Britain, until this overthrow was secured in the early nineteenth century by a series of rebellions within the empire, albeit rebellions provided with an important degree of British naval backing. Soft power can be seen as a vital adjunct of the Spanish imperial presence. This was more generally the case if major powers wished to move from conquest and occupation, to a degree of consent that would enable them to lessen the protection costs of imperial rule, as well as to increase the benefits of control. Thus, there was a clear materialist dimension to the benefits from soft power, and this power should be an important component in realist theories of international relations. It does not help quantifiers that, albeit with prominent exceptions such as foreign aid and trading advantages, the benefits

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of soft power are often difficult, or impossible, to quantify, nor that they are hard to integrate into theories of international relations that rely on clear-cut systemic criteria. That, however, does not make these benefits less important. China, at the present moment, is following the example of Japan in employing soft power, for example cultural and educational diplomacy, in order to create a positive image. The Chinese also seek to influence concepts of social and economic progress throughout the world. This has been particularly successful in South-East Asia,2 and, increasingly, in certain parts of Africa, and was given symbolic force in February 2006 when Hu Jintao, the President of China, began an eight-country tour of Africa, his third visit. More generally, pursuit of soft power poses the question whether, aside from realist interests, the challenges of economic change and social expectations will make perceptions of the Chinese model more attractive than their American counterparts. This may be particularly so for societies that lack the broadly based commitment to individualistic freedoms seen in the USA but also for authoritarian governments which dislike Western admonitions about issues such as corruption. From this perspective, the age of American power may be receding, or, rather, that power may be more partial and patchy than was the case in the 1990s. Within the West, the confederacy of power under American leadership that had aligned during the Cold War is becoming less coherent. Power, great or lesser, rests on coalitions of interest, domestic and international. The consequences may well be materialistic and measurable, not least in the shape of resources raised, whether taxes or troops, but the underlying reality is that of the processes of alliance. These processes are not simply social and political but also have a geographical dimension. This can be seen within, as well as between, countries, and these affect their policy-making. There is also a cultural dimension to alliances. Cultural commonalities may cause or arise from alliances, but that is not necessary. Norms are also important, not least trust. Norms, however, can also be deliberately rejected, as with some of the gesture politics of the diplomats of Revolutionary France3 or, more pointedly, when China recalled its diplomats during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. This explicit abandonment of established patterns of behaviour was linked to a very different evaluation of relative power to that of conventional states, namely, one that placed a high value on radical movements which were seen as both cause and consequence of an immutable and teleological historical process. The alliances that constituted or supported great powers varied substantially, and this is a key aspect of world history. In some cases, commerce was the key element, but in others there was far more of an emphasis on rulership and systems of control. Power, moreover, can be understood in various contexts. This book has taken a conventional approach, not least in response to Paul Kennedy’s thesis, but power now is also frequently discussed in terms of gender relations and with reference to narratives of race and ethnicity. Thus, rape and enforced prostitution can be seen as expressions of power, as with the mass rapes of German women by Soviet forces in the last stages of the Second World War, the use of ‘comfort women’, or sexual slaves, by the Japanese in East Asia in the early twentieth century, and mass rapes by Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s and by the Arab militia in Darfur in the 2000s. The use of power in ethnic terms, and for ethnic purposes, was a theme in imperial control and could also involve enforced flight, and even massacres. These purposes could

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be central to regimes, as with the segregation and killing of Jews by Nazi Germany. These ethnic purposes could also help define the identities of states, as with the Armenian massacres by Turkish nationalists in the 1910s which were a key aspect of the move towards a more Turco-Islamic definition of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. The current refusal to accept the harm that was done in these massacres is central to the presentation of Turkish nationalism by some Turkish right-wingers. Dimensions of power, such as the strength of identities and their capacity to elicit support, should not be ignored when focusing on broader issues of economic, military and political power. Nor are realist conceptions of international relations, with their focus on power, satisfactory unless the integral dependence of power on processes and ideas of negotiation and the perceptions of allies and others is fully realized. A declining power may find such coalitions harder to sustain, but, looked at differently, decline may be the product of the weakening of coalitions, whether international or domestic or both. From this perspective, the USA looks challenged in 2007, in part because of the unpopularity of recent policies, not simply on the Middle East, but also, for example, on climate change. One response is to argue that such unpopularity does not matter, and, indeed, that individual issues in international relations require coalitions of support and that the USA is capable of creating such coalitions on an ad hoc basis, as in 2003. This is correct but also may well be to under-rate the significance of overall moods of opinion. It may be remarkable that polls suggest that the USA has, across much of the world, become less trusted than an authoritarian state like China or a corruptly governed one like France. Nevertheless, these perceptions do play a role in international relations, not least as a consequence of widespread democratization, with all processes of government, including foreign policy, expected to be accountable to democratic agencies and the popular will. Considered in another light, it ought to concern American policy-makers that having played a major role in bringing the Cold War to a successful conclusion for Western values, in the shape of freedom, democracy and liberal economics, the legacy is not one in which American leadership is much respected. In part, this is because the use of force has been a wasting asset, not simply in Iraq but also as an instrument of foreign policy, both in securing goals and in sustaining alliances. Ironically, the same was true of the Soviet Union. While very different from the USA, because it was an authoritarian state, its international reputation was also compromised by the use of force, in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1980–8. Although American failure in the aftermath of victory in a minor war in 2003 has indicated the problems of the great-power aspirations of those directing American policy, these problems cannot be referred away by discussion in terms of overstretch, because that implies a correct stretch that is conceptually questionable. It is the conditional nature of great-power status that emerges most clearly in the 2000s. This is not simply the case of the USA, but would also be the issue if China, whether in addition or instead, shared this status. This conditional nature challenges the established definition of great-power status in terms of hegemonic capability but captures the problems that are inseparable from this status. Part of the problem is that hegemony is not generally understood in sufficiently cautious terms. Phrases such as the age of British or American power do not invite qualification and thus treat checks or defeats as aspects of failure and, indeed, of the end

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of the age. The assumption of a distinct age, moreover, is crucial to the idea of a sequence of hegemonic powers, but that is not a helpful concept if it neglects the co-terminous nature of great-power status, not least because, aside from realist criteria of strength, power, as already indicated, is in part a matter of perception and will. Reliance on will may be proved misleading and fallible during major wars, as Germany and Japan discovered in 1945, but such conflicts are relatively rare and any discussion of power status should take note of this. In the absence of major wars, there is an indeterminacy in power ratios that makes a precise definition and designation of great powers misleading and leaves room for perception and will. Thus, over-determined theories, while they offer an attractive clarity, fail to capture a situation in which the understanding of power involves a high level of subjectivity, variety and debate. The present world is making that very clear, and there is no reason to imagine that the situation will be different in the future. Indeed, the more multipolar the world and the less the powers are constrained by bipolar alliance systems, the more there will be room for subjectivity and debate, not least over the nature of strength and the relationship between the powers. The reach for multipolarity is shown by the critics of American power, such as President Putin who, in February 2007, publicly criticized the USA for seeking global dominance, for bellicosity, resorting to force and for ignoring the sovereignty of other powers. Putin claimed that the USA had ‘over-stepped its national borders in every way’. In part, this is ironic, given the bullying character of Russian policy towards its neighbours. Furthermore, Russian policy-makers have shown only limited success in adapting to the growth, strength and assertiveness of China and, even more, India. Nevertheless, the remarks capture the reality of an international system in which, alongside resource issues, the dynamic characteristics of power include the shifting responses of leaders to the apparent strength and intentions of other major states. As far as individual states are concerned, cultural cohesion is a key element in fostering internal stability. China appears to possess this element and for it also to be linked to a determination to surpass the USA in every index of power, a determination in which anger plays a role. In contrast, Russia appears to lack this cohesion and an ability to foster individual initiative. Indeed, the political and economic structures in Russia damage the ability of its people to succeed. Thus, the functioning of government also influences the power of a nation. Paul Kennedy asked the question whether American public culture and government were able to ensure the necessary ability and drive to identify appropriate goals and surmount problems. This question is still pertinent today.

Notes 1 The Kennedy thesis considered 1 P.C.Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 2 G.Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 1–13, and ‘Disjointed Historiography and Islamic Military Technology: The European Military Revolution Debate and the Ottomans’, in M.Kaçar and Z.Durukal (eds), Essays in Honour of Ekmeleddin ihsanoğlu (2 vols, Istanbul, 2006), I, pp. 567–82, esp. pp. 573–82. 3 L.Balabanlilar, ‘Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent’, Journal of World History, 18 (2007), p. 1. 4 S.Subrahmanyam, ‘A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context’, Common Knowledge, 12 (2006), pp. 66–92. 5 J.Lynn, ‘The Evolution of Army Style in the Modern West, 800–2000’, and W.R.Thompson, ‘A Test of a Theory of Co-evolution in War: Lengthening the Western Eurasian Military Trajectory’, International History Review, 18 (1996), pp. 505–45, 28 (2006), pp. 473–503. 6 K.A.Rasler and W.R.Thompson, The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490–1990 (Lexington, Ky., 1994); R.Reuveny and W.R.Thompson, Growth, Trade, and Systemic Leadership (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2004). 7 See, for example, J.Barry, ‘Is It Twilight for America? A Book of Knells’, Newsweek, 25 January 1988, p. 21; R.J.Dowling, ‘Why the U.S.Can’t Keep Playing Global Policeman’, Business Week, 1 February 1988, pp. 11, 15; P. Gray, ‘Why All Empires Come to Dust’, Time, 15 February 1988, pp. 91–2; M. Lerner, ‘No More “Number Ones” in a New World’, Wall Street Journal, 19 February 1988, p. 17. American book-club selections included leading choice by the History Book Club, in March 1988, the Book-of-the-Month Club, for spring 1988, and the Quality Paperback Book Club, for July 1988. 8 G.Orwell, ‘Perfide Albion’, review of Liddell Hart’s British Way of Warfare, New Statesman, 21 November 1942, pp. 342–3. 9 For example, L.Loreto, Per la Storia Militare del Mondo Antico: Prospettive Retrospettive (Naples, 2006), pp. 252–3. 10 K.Clouston, ‘US Military Over-Stretch: Fact or Fiction?’, Royal United Services Institute Newsbrief, 26 (2006), p. 126. Cf. C.Flint, ‘Dynamic Metageographies of Terrorism’, in C.Flint (ed.), The Geography of War and Peace (Oxford, 2005), p. 208. 11 Kennedy, e-mail of 1 February 2007 in response to draft of this chapter. 12 I have benefited greatly from the advice of Arthur Eckstein. See J.Rutenburg and A.M.Eckstein, ‘The Return of the Fall of Rome’, International History Review, 29 (2007), pp. 109–22; A.M.Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley, Calif., 2006). 13 M.Mann, review of Kennedy, British Journal of Sociology, 40 (1989), p. 334. 14 R.F.Hamilton, President McKinley, War and Empire. I. President McKinley and the Coming of War, 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2006), p. 252.

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15 G.J.Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ, 2001). 16 T.J.Barfield, ‘The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier’, in S.E.Alcock, T.N.D’Altroy, K.D.Morrison and C.M.Sinopli (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 29, 33. 17 R.L.Tammen et al., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (New York, 2000), p. 18. 18 R.Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1976); J.Kugler and M.Arbetman, ‘Choosing among Measures of Power: A Review of the Empirical Record’, in R.J.Stoll and M.D.Ward (eds), Power in World Politics (Boulder, Col., 1989), pp. 49–77. 19 J.H.Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006), p. 411. 20 G.Modelski and W.R.Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Politics and Economics (Columbia, SC, 1996). 21 P.Kennedy, ‘Pointers from the Past’, Foreign Affairs, 66 (1988), p. 111. 22 A.Giddens, review of Kennedy, British Journal of Sociology, 40 (1989), p. 330. 23 L.Ortega, ‘Nitrates, Chilean Entrepreneurs, and the Origins of the War of the Pacific’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 16 (1984), pp. 337–80; S.Pelletière, Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf (Westport, Conn., 2001). 24 D.O’Connor, ‘The Suez Crisis 1876–82’, RUSI Journal, 151, 3 (June 2006), pp. 74–8. 25 P.Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), p. 254. 26 I owe this point to H.P.Willmott. 27 T.T.Petersen, ‘How Not to Stand Up to Arabs and Israelis’, International History Review, 25 (2003), p. 621. 28 Kennedy, Rise and Fall (1988), p. 231. 29 J.Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989). 30 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, pp. 98, 111. 31 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 267. 32 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 97. 33 G.Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interesty 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002); J.Black, Kings, Nobles and Commoners: States and Societies in Early Modern Europe: A Revisionist History (London, 2004). 34 J.Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge, 1997); D.Parrott, ‘Cultures of Combat in the Ancien Régime: Linear Warfare, Noble Values, and Entrepreneurship’, International History Review, 27 (2005), pp. 518–33. 35 M.J.Rodríguez-Salgado, The Changing Face of Empire: Charles V, Philip II and Habsburg Authority, 1551–1559 (Cambridge, 1988). 36 J.Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London, 2001). 37 S.Striffler, In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company., Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995 (Durham, NC, 2002). 38 R.Heilbroner, ‘Is America Falling Behind? An Interview with Paul Kennedy’, American Heritage (September/October 1988), p. 100. 39 A.I.Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 215, 253. 40 W.W.Rostow, ‘Beware of Historians Bearing False Analogies’ and ‘Pointers from the Past’, Foreign Affairs, 66 (1988), pp. 868, 1113. 41 S.Morillo, ‘The Sword of Justice: War and State Formation in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Medieval Military History, 4 (2006), p. 17.

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42 See, e.g., D.B.Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empire, 1415–1980 (New Haven, Conn., 2000). 43 D.R.Stone, A Military History of Russia (Westport, Conn., 2006). 44 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, pp. 219–21. 45 V.D.Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York, 1989) and Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Westem Power (New York, 2001). 46 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 118. 47 Thompson, ‘Co-Evolution’, p. 497. 48 J.Black, The Age of Total War 1860–1945 (Westport, Conn., 2006). 49 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 375. 50 B.J.C.McKercher,’ “Our Most Dangerous Enemy”: Great Britain Pre-eminent in the 1930s’, International History Review, 13 (1991), p. 756. 51 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 116. 52 J.Black, From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (London, 1999); P.Schroeder, ‘Napoleon’s Foreign Policy: A Criminal Enterprise’, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe: Proceedings 1989, pp. 105–6, and The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), e.g., pp. 396–412. A much more positive account is offered by R.M.Epstein, ‘Revisiting Napoleon: For and Against’, Consortium 1998. 53 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism, Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London, 1993). 54 J.Blatt (ed.), The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Oxford, 1998); J.Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003). 55 M.R.Brawley, Liberal Leadership: Great Powers and their Challengers in Peace and War (Ithaca, NY, 1993). 56 C.Kupchan, The End of the American Era (New York, 2003); N.Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London, 2004). 57 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 118. 58 J.D.Tracy, Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2002). 59 G.Melancon, Britain’s China Policy and the Opium Crisis: Balancing Drugs, Violence, and National Honour, 1833–1840 (Aldershot, 2003). 60 F.Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). 61 P.Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn., 1992); J.Cornette, Le Roi de Guerre: Essai sur la Souveraineté dans la France du Grand Siècle (Paris, 1993); C.Mukerji, Territorial Ambition and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997). 62 G.B.Strang, On the Fiery March: Mussolini Prepares for War (Westport, Conn., 2003). 63 G.L.Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders (Cambridge, 2005). 64 N.E.Sarantakes, ‘One Last Crusade: The British Pacific Fleet and its Impact on the AngloAmerican Alliance’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), pp. 429–66. 65 For a criticism of Kennedy’s reliance on secondary sources, E.Luttwak, ‘A History of World Economies’, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 3 January 1988, p. 35. 66 J.P.LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford, 2004), p. viii. 67 W.Kristol, ‘Postscript—June 2004’, in I.Stelzer (ed.), The Neocon Reader (New York, 2004), p. 75. 68 P.Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (Cambridge, 2001). 69 J.S.Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004). 70 G.Martel, ‘The Meaning of Power: Rethinking the Decline and Fall of Great Britain’, International History Review, 13 (1991), p. 694.

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2 Bids for mastery, 1500–90 1 J.Levy and W.R.Thompson, ‘Hegemonic Threats and Great Power Balancing in Europe, 1495–1999’, Security Studies, 14 (2005), pp. 1–30. 2 W.Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (3 vols, London, 1769), Vol. I, pp. 90–1. 3 J.France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000–1714 (London, 2005). 4 T.T.Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, 2001). 5 T.M.May, ‘The Mongol Presence and Impact in the Lands of the Eastern Mediterranean’, in D.J.Kagay and L.J.A.Villalon (eds), Crusaders, Condottieri and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies Around the Mediterranean (Leiden, 2003), pp. 133–56; P.Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Harlow, 2005). 6 I am most grateful for the advice of Timothy May. 7 A.Attman, American Bullion in European World Trade, 1600–1800 (Gothenburg, 1986). 8 I.B.McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1530–1750 (Atlanta, Ga., 1999); V.Baladouni, ‘The Armenian Silk Road: An Economic and Politico-Cultural Landscape’, Journal of European Economic History, 33 (2004), p. 694. 9 P.Lorge, draft introduction to his The Asian Military Revolution (Cambridge, forthcoming). I would like to thank Peter for letting me have a copy. 10 E.L.Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York, 2007). 11 N.Housley (ed.), Crusading in the Fifteenth Century. Message and Impact (Basingstoke, 2004). 12 J.M.Headly, ‘The Habsburg World Empire and the Revival of Ghibellinism’, Medieval Renaissance Studies, 7 (1975), pp. 93–127. 13 W.A.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston, Mass., 1997); W.R.Mead, ‘American Grand Strategy in a World at Risk’, Orbis, 49 (2005), p. 591. 14 G.Raudzens (ed.), Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories (Leiden, 2001). 15 K.N.Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985); J.Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires. Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1990) and The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1992); R.P.Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge, 1999). 16 P.H.H.Vries, ‘Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence’, Journal of World History, 12 (2001), p. 417. 17 P.Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany, NY, 1994). 18 M.Dressler, ‘Inventing Orthodoxy: Competing Claims for Authority and Legitimacy in the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict’, in H.T.Karateke and M.Reinkowski (eds), Legitimizing the Order: the Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden, 2005), pp. 151–73. 19 R.Murphey, ‘Süleyman I and the Conquest of Hungary: Ottoman Manifest Destiny or a Delayed Reaction to Charles V’s Universalist Vision’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5 (2001), pp. 197–221. 20 M.Kunt and C.Woodhead (eds), Süleyman the Magnificent and his Age: The Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World (London, 1995).

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21 G.Imber, ‘The Navy of Süleyman the Magnificent’, Archivum Ottomanicum, 6 (1980), pp. 211–82. 22 G.David and P.Fodor (eds), Hungarian-Ottoman Military and Diplomatic Relations in the Age of Suleyman the Magnificent (Budapest, 1994). 23 Z.Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge, 2004). 24 G.Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, Conn., 1998). 25 W.Cook, The Hundred Years’ War for Morocco: Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World (Boulder, Col., 1994). 26 R.Murphey, ‘A Comparative Look at Ottoman and Habsburg Resources and Readiness for War circa 1520 to circa 1570’, in E.G.Hernán and D.Maffi (eds), Guerra y Sociedad en La Monarquía Hispánica: Politica, Estrategia y Cultura en la Europa Moderna, 1500–1700 (2 vols, Madrid, 2006), Vol. I, pp. 100–2. 27 A.N.Kurat, ‘The Turkish Expediton to Astrakhan in 1569’, Slavonic and East European Review, 40 (1961–2), pp. 7–23; W.E.D.Allen, Problems of Turkish Power in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1963). 28 R.A.Stradling, Philip IV and the Government of Spain, 1621–1665 (Cambridge, 1988). 29 G.Parker, Success is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2002), p. 3. 30 S.J.Gunn, ‘The French Wars of Henry VIII’, in J.M.Black (ed.), The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 34–40; P.S.Fichtner, ‘The Politics of Honor: Renaissance Chivalry and Hapsburg Dynasticism’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 29 (1967), pp. 567–80; E.H.Dickerman and A.M.Walker, ‘The Choice of Hercules: Henry IV as Hero’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 315–37. 31 P.Williams, ‘The Strategy of Galley Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1560–1620’, in Guerra y Sociedad, Vol. I, pp. 891–920. 32 A.C.Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago, Ill., 1978). 33 R.Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (London, 1994). 34 J.F.Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 176–93. 35 M.Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 28–36. 36 J.Lindegren, ‘The “Swedish Military State”, 1560–1720’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 10 (1985), pp. 305–36. 37 K.M.Swope, ‘Deceit, Disguise and Dependence: China, Japan, and the Future of the Tributary System’, International History Review, 24 (2002), pp. 758, 786; A.L.Sadler, ‘The Naval Campaign in the Korean War of Hideyoshi (1592–8)’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 2nd ser., 14 (1937), pp. 177–208. 38 K.Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge, 1984). 39 G.Halkos and N.Kyrazis, ‘A Naval Revolution and Institutional Change: The Case of the United Provinces’, European Journal of Law and Economics, 19 (2005), pp. 41–68. 40 K.Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven, Conn., 1978). 41 J.Heers, The Barbary Corsairs: Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1480–1580 (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003). 42 J.McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel (New Haven, Conn., 2005). 43 L.Sicking, Neptune and the Netherlands: State, Economy, and War at Sea in the Renaissance (Leiden, 2004). 44 T.Barker, Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy in Essays of War, Society and Government in Austria, 1618–1780 (Boulder, Col., 1982).

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45 C.Imber, ‘The Reconstruction of the Ottoman Fleet after the Battle of Lepanto’, in C.Imber (ed.), Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Istanbul, 1996), pp. 85–101. 46 L.Silver, ‘Shining Armour: Maximilian I as Holy Roman Emperor’, Museum Studies: Art Institute of Chicago, 12 (1985), pp. 8–29. 47 H.van de Ven (ed.), Warfare in Chinese History (Leiden, 2000). 48 R.Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1976); K.Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London, 1979); C.S.Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), pp. 49–70. For valuable applications, G.G.Reynolds, ‘Reconsidering American Strategic History and Doctrines’, in his History of the Sea: Essayson Maritime Strategies (Columbia, SC, 1989); A.I.Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NY, 1995); E.Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge, 1996); G.Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, Conn., 1998) and The World is Not Enough: The Imperial Vision of Philip II of Spain (Waco, Tex., 2001); L.Sondhaus, ‘The Strategic Culture of the Habsburg Army’, Austrian History Yearbook, 32 (2001), pp. 225–34; J.P.LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford, 2004), and G.Ágoston, ‘Information, Ideology, and Limits of Imperial Policy: Ottoman Grand Strategy in the Context of Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry’, in V.H.Aksan and D.Goffman (eds), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, 2007). 49 G.Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven, Conn., 2003). 50 W.R.Mead, ‘The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy’, National Interest, 58 (winter, 1999–2000), pp. 5–29. 51 S.Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War: Origins of the Total Security State in the USSR and the Outbreak of World War II in Europe (London, 2002). 52 J.Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md., 2002). 53 K.Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (Cambridge, 2003). 54 H.J.Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal, 23 (1904), pp. 421–37. 55 W.McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, Ill., 1964). 56 C.Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (London, 1987); T.J.Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford, 1989); S.Jagehild and V.J.Symons, Peace, War, and Trade along the Great Wall: Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (Bloomington, Ind., 1989). 57 R.Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors (Cambridge, 2003). 58 S.Sutrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (Harlow, 1993), p. 49; P.Russell, Prince Henry ‘The Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, Conn., 2000). 59 E.Tenace, ‘A Strategy of Reaction: The Armadas of 1596 and 1597 and the Spanish Struggle for European Hegemony’, English Historical Review, 18 (2003), pp. 855–82. 60 W.Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge, 1990). 61 L.Scales, ‘Germen Militiae: War and German Identity in the Later Middle Ages’, Past and Present, 180 (August 2003), pp. 80–1. 62 J.Pelenski, Russia and Kazan: Conquest and Imperial Ideology, 1438–1560s (The Hague, 1974). 63 G.Richardson, Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (London, 2002).

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64 J.Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500–1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London, 2000); T.A.Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime Republic 1559–1684 (Baltimore, Md., 2005). 65 S.M.Greenfield, ‘Madeira and the Beginning of New World Sugar Cane Cultivation and Plantation Slavery’, in V.D.Rubin and A.Tuden (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (New York, 1977), pp. 536–52. 66 D.E.Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire (Delhi, 1989); J.Gommans, Mughal Warfare (London, 2002). 67 E.Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990); M.Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London, 1991); M.Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997); G.Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester, 1998). 68 J.F.Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 20–4. 69 M.Raeff, The Well Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through the Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1983). 70 J.Casey, The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1979). 71 J.Black, The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Westport, Conn., 2006). 72 F.González de León and G.Parker, ‘The Grand Strategy of Philip II and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1559–1584’, in S.G.Darby (ed.), The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt (London, 2001), pp. 107–32. 73 P.C.Allen, Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598–1621: The Failure of Grand Strategy (New Haven, Conn., 2000). 74 M.P.Holt, ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1993), pp. 523–51. 75 D.Parker, La Rochelle and the French Monarchy: Conflict and Order in SeventeenthCentury France (London, 1980).

3 Seventeenth-century crises, 1590–1680 1 J.Thornton, War fare in Atlantic Africa, 1450–1800 (London, 1999). 2 W.Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco. Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World (Boulder, Col., 1994). 3 H.Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, Conn., 1997), pp. 175–6. 4 D.A.Hoard, ‘Ottoman Historiography and the Literature of “Decline” of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Joumal of Asian History, 22 (1988), pp. 52–77; L.Darling, RevenueRaising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire 1560–1660 (Leiden, 1996). 5 G.Böreckçi, ‘A Contribution to the Military Revolution Debate: The Janissaries’ Use of Volley Fire during the Long Ottoman-Habsburg War of 1593–1606 and the Problems of Origins’, Acta Orientalia Academia Scientiarum Hung., 59 (2006), pp. 404–38. 6 E.van Veen, ‘How the Dutch Ran a Seventeenth-Century Colony: The Occupation and Loss of Formosa, 1624–1662’, Itinerario, 20 (1996), pp. 59–77. 7 L.Blussé, ‘The Dutch Occupation of the Pescadores (1622–1624)’, Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan, 18 (1973), pp. 28–43. 8 M.Jacq-Hergoualceh, ‘La France et le Siam de 1680 a 1685: Histoire d’un échec’, Revue française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer (1995), pp. 257–75.

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9 G.J.Ames, ‘Pedro II and the Estado da India: Braganzan Absolutism and Overseas Empire, 1668–1783’, Luso-Brazilian Review, 34 (1997), pp. 9–10; E.Van Veen, Decay or Defeat? An Enquiry into the Portuguese Decline in Asia, 1580–1645 (Leiden, 2000). 10 E.A.P.Crownheart-Vaughan and T.Vaughan (eds), Russia’s Conquest of Siberia (Portland, Oreg., 1985). 11 G.D.Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon: Transition to Dutch Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); J.Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989). 12 J.Glete, ‘The Sea Power of Habsburg Spain and the Development of European Navies, 1500–1700’, in Guerra y Sociedad, Vol. I, pp. 836–8. 13 D.Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government, and Society in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge, 2001). 14 L.A.Struve, The Southern Ming 1644–1662 (New Haven, Conn., 1984). 15 L.D.Kessler, K’ang-hsi and the Consolidation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661–1684 (Chicago, Ill., 1976); F.Wakeman, The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley, Calif., 1985). 16 J.H.Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640 (Cambridge, 1963) and The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven, Conn., 1986). 17 J.Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (Oxford, 1982). 18 C.Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford, 1957). 19 G.Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (2nd edn, London, 1997). 20 J.Inglis-Jones, ‘The Battle of the Dunes, 1658: Condé, War and Power Politics’, War in History, 1 (1994), pp. 249–77. 21 C.Storrs, ‘The Army of Lombardy and the Resilience of Spanish Power in Italy in the Reign of Carlos II (1665–1700)’, War in History, 4 (1997), pp. 371–97, 5 (1998), pp. 1–22. 22 J.Black, European Warfare, 1494–1660 (London, 2002). 23 M.Knox and W.Murray (eds), The Dynamics of Military Revolution (Cambridge, 2001). 24 A.W.Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford, 2003). 25 B.Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Élite of 1730 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1982). 26 R.Stradling, Spain’s Struggle for Europe (London, 1994). 27 G.Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665–1700 (Oxford, 2006). 28 H.Kamen, Philip V (New Haven, Conn., 2001). 29 R.Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, 1991). 30 J.K.J.Thomson, Decline in History. The European Experience (Oxford, 1998). 31 P.Musgrave, Land and Economy in Baroque Italy: Valpolicella, 1630–1797 (Leicester, 1992), esp. p. 75. 32 L.Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994); J.N.Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000); R.Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (Durham, NC, 2007). 33 G.Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, c. 1640–1683 (Amsterdam, 2000); R.J.Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY, 2002). 34 C.Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park, Pa., 2001). 35 R.Frost, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War (Cambridge, 1993). 36 Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power (London, 2002), p. 491. 37 M.Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, Md., 1998); R.Law and K.Mann, ‘West Africa in the Atlantic

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Community: The Case of the Slave Coast’, William and Mary Quarterly, 56 (1999), pp. 307–34. 38 G.Nováky, Handelskompanier och kompanihandel: Svenska Afrikakompaniet 1649–1663 (Uppsala, 1990), English summary, pp. 241, 244. 39 R.Porter and M.Teich (eds), The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge, 1992); L.Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992); P.Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Basing-stoke, 2001). 40 M.Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford, 1997). 41 S.S.Genuth, Comets, Popular Culture and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 42 J.A.Goldstone, ‘Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk and Innovation: The Divergence of East and West in the Early Modern World?’, Sociological Theory, 5 (1987), pp. 119–35; G.Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2005). 43 B.Steele, ‘Muskets and Pendulums: Benjamin Robins, Leonhard Euler and the Ballistics Revolution’, Technology and Culture, 34 (1994), pp. 348–82. 44 B.Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas (Chicago, Ill., 1996). 45 J.B.Harley and D. Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago, Ill., 1994). 46 J.B.Harley and D.Woodward (eds), Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago, 1992). 47 L.B.Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago, 1997). 48 J.L.Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison, Wisc., 1967). 49 K.Zandvliet, Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Amsterdam, 1998). 50 M.J.Bok, ‘The Rise of Amsterdam as a Cultural Centre: The Market for Paintings, 1580– 1680’, in P.O’Brien, M.’t Hart and H.van der Wee (eds), Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge, 2001), p. 202. 51 J.Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago, Ill., 1987); C.M.Petto, When France was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Lanham, Md., 2007). 52 G.Ágoston, ‘Information, Ideology, and Limits of Imperial Policy: Ottoman Grand Strategy in the Context of Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry’, in V.H.Aksan and D.Goffman (eds), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 80–1. 53 S.Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London, 2004). 54 H.H.Rowen, The King’s State: Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980); P.Fichtner, Protestantism and Primogeniture in Early Modern Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1989).

4 The rise of the great powers, 1680–1774 1 P.C.Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquests of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

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2 See also J.J.L.Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710–1780 (Leiden, 1995). 3 C.R.Boxer, ‘The Siege of Fort Zeelandia and the Capture of Formosa from the Dutch, 1661–62’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London, 24 (1926–7), pp. 16–47. 4 J.P.Le Donne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford, 2004). 5 R.I.Frost, The Northern Wars 1558–1721 (Harlow, 2000). 6 M.Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (London, 2006). 7 G.Ágoston, ‘Muslim—Christian Acculturation: Ottomans and Hungarians from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’, in B.Bennassar and R.Sauzet (eds), Chrétiens et Musulmans a la Renaissance (Paris, 1998), pp. 294–5. 8 A.S.Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 1552–1740 (New Haven, Conn., 1968); D.Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1992); J.Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (2nd edn, London, 1995). 9 R.Matthee, ‘Iran’s Ottoman Diplomacy during the Reign of Shah Sulayman I (1077– 1105/1666–94)’, in K. Eslami (ed.), Iran and Iranian Studies. Papers in Honor of Iraj Afshar (Princeton, NJ, 1998), pp. 152–9. 10 J.Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and Statebuilding in Europe and America, 1500–1860 (2 vols, Stockholm, 1993). 11 A.Altman, Dutch Enterprise in the World Bullion Trade, 1550–1800 (Gothenburg, 1983). 12 S.J.and B.H.Stein, Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000). 13 H.E.S.Fisher, The Portugal Trade: A Study of Anglo-Portuguese Commerce, 1700–1770 (London, 1971). 14 J.J.McCusker and R.R.Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985). 15 L.Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990). 16 E.Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), ed. J.B.Bury (seven vols, London, 1897–1901), Vol. IV, pp. 166–7. 17 J.Pelenki, Russia and Kazan: Conquest and Imperial Ideology, 1438–1560s (The Hague, 1974). 18 B.Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 (London, 2007). 19 K.Pomeranz, ‘Two Worlds of Trade, Two Worlds of Empire: European State-Making and Industrialization in a Chinese Mirror’, in D.Smith, D.Solinger and S.Topik (eds), States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy (London, 1999), pp. 87–94. 20 J.Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1450–1800 (London, 1999); M.Newitt, Portuguese Settlement in the Zambezi (London, 1973), pp. 1–73. 21 F.Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984). 22 T.J.Barfield The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Oxford, 1989). 23 J.Black, European International Relations, 1648–1815 (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 6–8. 24 X.Lamikiz, ‘Trust and Trade/Commerciar en Confianza: Overseas Networks of Basque and Castilian Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Spain’ (Ph.D. thesis, London, 2006), p. 262; B.Marsden and C.Smith, Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 5, 258. 25 C.A.Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), p. 89. 26 M.Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748 (Delhi, 1986); J.J.Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c. 1710–1780 (Leiden, 1995).

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27 B.Baack, ‘British versus American Interests in Land and the War of American Independence’, Journal of European Economic History, 33 (2004), pp. 533–7. 28 A.Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer and the Knout: An Economic History of EighteenthCentury Russia (Chicago, Ill., 1985). 29 T.Barker, Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy: Essays on War, Society and Government in Austria, 1618–1780 (Boulder, Col., 1982); G.Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (London, 1998). 30 J.Black, Kings, Nobles and Commoners: States and Societies in Early Modern Europe. A Revisionist History (London, 2004). 31 H.M.Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2 vols, Basingstoke, 2007). 32 A.M.Eckstein, ‘Rome as the Pattern of Empire’, International History Review, 24 (2002), pp. 846–7, 855. 33 E.C.Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton, NJ, 1984). 34 D.Armitage and M.J.Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002). 35 J.Black, Trade, Empire and British Foreign Policy, 1689–1815: The Politics of a Commercial State (London, 2007). 36 P.G.M.Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967); F.Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge, 1990); L.Prados de la Escosura (ed.), Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688–1815 (Cambridge, 2004). 37 J.Pritchard, Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration (Kingston, 1987); J.R.Dull, The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War (Lincoln, Nebr., 2005). 38 T.C.Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 (Oxford, 2005). 39 A.Frost, The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764–1815 (Melbourne, 2003). 40 P.Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilisations: The British Expedition to China, 1792–4 (London, 1993); J.L.Cranmer-Byng (ed.), An Embassy to China, Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney (London, 2004).

5 A reshaped world, 1775–1860 1 H.Moyse-Bartlett, The Pirates of Trucial Oman (London, 1966). 2 C.N.Parkinson, Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth, Admiral of the Red (London, 1934), pp. 419–72. 3 D.B.Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600–1914 (Chicago, Ill., 1990). 4 R.G.S.Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for the South Asian Military Economy (Cambridge, 2004). 5 V.Aksan, ‘Breaking the Spell of the Baron de Tott: Reframing the Question of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830’, International History Review, 24 (2002), pp. 253–77. 6 S.J.Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).

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7 V.Aksan, ‘War and Peace’, in S.Fraoqhi (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey III: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 81–117, esp. p. 117, and ‘Military Reform and its Limits in a Shrinking Ottoman World, 1800–1840’, in V.Aksan and D.Goffman (eds), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 134–56. 8 V.Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow, 2007). 9 Aksan, ‘Military Reform’, p. 121. 10 T.P.Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy (New York, 1954). 11 J.J.Ripley, Tarnished Warrior: Major-General James Wilkinson (New York, 1933). 12 L.D.Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982). 13 R.H.Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York, 1975). 14 T.J.Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809 (New York, 1989). 15 S.C.Tucker, The Jeffersonian Gunboat Navy (Columbia, SC, 1993). 16 J.M.Banner, To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts (New York, 1970). 17 J.Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (New York, 1992); M.A.Centeno, ‘War in Modern Latin America’, in J.Black (ed.), War in the Modern World Since 1815 (London, 2003), pp. 149–64. 18 D.Northrup, ‘Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term’, Journal of World History, 16 (2005), p. 263. 19 P.O’Brien, ‘Making the Modern World Economy’, History, 87 (2002), p. 552. 20 K.Pomeranz, ‘Re-Thinking the Late Imperial Chinese Economy: Development, Disaggregation and Decline, circa 1730–1930’, Itinerario, 24 (2000), pp. 49–66. 21 C.Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 BC–AD 907 (Honolulu, 2001). 22 C.Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004).

6 Accelerated change, 1860–1913 1 M.R.Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, Md., 2006). 2 W.H.Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The US Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore, Md., 2002). 3 J.Dunn, Khedive Ismail’s Army (New York, 2005). 4 S.Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001). 5 R.G.S.Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy (Cambridge, 2004). 6 B.Marsden and C.Smith, Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2005). 7 D.R.Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 2000), e.g., p. 115. 8 P.Burroughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, in A.Porter (ed.), The Nineteenth Century, Vol. III of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1999), p. 321.

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9 D.S.A.Bell, ‘Desolving Distance: Technology, Space and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), p. 523–62. 10 A.Preston and J.Major, Send a Gunboat…1854–1904 (London, 1967); J.Y.Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–60) in China (Cambridge, 1998). 11 W.S.Miles, Hausaland Divided: Capitalism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 12 P.Ghosh, Brave Men of the Hills: Resistance and Rebellion in Burma, 1825–1932 (Honolulu, HI, 2000). 13 A.Moore-Harell, Gordon and the Sudan: Prologue to the Mahdiyya, 1877–1880 (London, 2001). 14 T.Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, HI, 1994). 15 F.F.Anscombe, ‘The Ottoman Empire in Recent International Politics—I: The Case of Kuwait’, International History Review, 28 (2006), pp. 551–8. 16 C.Clay, Gold for the Sultan: Western Bankers and Ottoman Finance, 1856–1881 (London, 2000). 17 E.J.Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, Conn., 2001). 18 D.Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb, Ill., 2001). 19 R.F.Bauman, ‘Subject Nationalities in the Military Service of Imperial Russia: The Case of the Bashkirs’, Slavic Review, 46 (1987), pp. 489–502. 20 A.Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005). 21 E.Ingram, The British Empire as a World Power (London, 2001). 22 For this concept, J.Gommans, Mughal Warfare (London, 2002). 23 J.Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney, 2002). 24 M.Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, Pa., 1998). 25 B.A.Elman, ‘Naval Warfare and the Refraction of China’s Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure, 1865–1895’, Modern Asian Studies, 38 (2004), esp. p. 326. 26 K.Pomeranz, ‘Without Coal? Colonies? Calculus? Counterfactuals and Industrialization in Europe and China’, in P.E.Tetlock, R.N.Lebow and G.Parker (eds), Unmaking the West: ‘What-If?’ Scenarios that Rewrite World History (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2006), p. 248. 27 B.Vandervort, Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States, 1812–1900 (London, 2006), p. xiv. 28 D.C.M.Platt, Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford, 1977); R.Miller, Britain and Latin America in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1993). 29 M.Cunningham, Mexico and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III (Basingstoke, 2001). 30 M.A.Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, Pa., 2002). 31 C.Bergquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886–1910 (Durham, NC, 1978); W.S.Dudley, ‘Professionalisation and Politisation as Motivational Factors in the Brazilian Army Coup of 15 November 1889’, Joumal of Latin American Studies, 8 (1976), pp. 101– 25. 32 T.G.Otte,’ “Avenge England’s Dishonour”: By-Elections, Parliament and the Politics of Foreign Policy in 1898’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), pp. 385–428. 33 D.Porch, The Conquest of Morocco (New York, 1983). 34 P.A.Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York, 1997); R.R.Thompson, ‘Military Dimensions of the “Boxer Uprising” in Shanxi,

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1898–1901’, in H.van de Ven (ed.), Warfare in Chinese History (Leiden, 2000), pp. 288–319. 35 B.M.Linn, The US Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989). 36 I.V.Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2005). 37 K.Epstein, ‘Erzberger and the German Colonial Scandals, 1905–1910’, English Historical Review, 74 (1959), p. 637. 38 P.T.Marsh, Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market, 1860–1892 (New Haven, Conn., 2000). 39 M.P.Costeloe, Bonds and Bondholders: British Investors and Mexico’s Foreign Debt, 1824–1888 (Westport, Conn., 2003). 40 S.R.B.Smith, ‘Public Opinion, the Navy and the City of London: The Drive for British Naval Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century’, War and Society, 9 (1991), pp. 29–50. 41 J.A.Beeler, ‘A One Power Standard? Great Britain and the Balance of Naval Power, 1860–1880’, Joumal of Strategic Studies, 15 (1992), esp. p. 571, and British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1866–1890 (Stanford, Calif., 1997). 42 R.W.Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years (London, 2003). 43 M.Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850–1914 (London, 1982). 44 C.I.Hamilton, The Anglo-French Naval Rivalry 1840–1870 (Oxford, 1993); A.D.Lambert, ‘Palmerston, Gladstone and the Management of the Ironclad Naval Race, 1859–1865’, Northern Mariner, 8 (1998). 45 P.Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London, 1980); H.J.Herwig, ‘The German Reaction to the Dreadnought Revolution’, International History Review, 13 (1991), pp. 273–83. 46 D.A.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, Md., 1984). 47 R.Hobson, Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (Leiden, 2002). 48 T.G.Otte, ‘The Fragmenting of the Old World Order: Britain, the Great Powers, and the War’, in R.Kowner (ed.), The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (London, 2006), p. 104. 49 F.Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, NJ, 1998). 50 A.J.and K.A.Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1971); London, National Archives, Foreign Office papers, 5/950 fols 19–22. 51 K.Neilson,’ “Greatly Exaggerated”: The Myth of the Decline of Great Britain before 1914’, International History Review, 13 (1991), p. 725. 52 For the mentalities of the key American decision-makers of the 1890s, W.Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Great Americans Made their Country a World Power (New York, 2002). 53 M.Epkenhans, ‘Military-Industrial Relations in Imperial Germany, 1870–1914’, War in History, 10 (2003), pp. 1–26. 54 S.E.Miller, S.M.Lynn-Jones and S.Van Evera (eds), Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (2nd edn, Princeton, NJ, 1991); G.A.Tunstall, Planning for War Against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and German Military Strategies, 1871–1914 (Boulder, Col., 1993); A.Mitchell, The Great Train Race: Railways and Franco-German Rivalry, 1815–1914 (New York, 2000). 55 D.Omissi and A.S.Thompson (eds), The Impact of the South African War (Basing-stoke, 2002).

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56 A.Rossos, Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908–1914 (Toronto, 1981). 57 M.Cornwall (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (Exeter, 2002). 58 D.N.Collins, ‘The Franco-Russian Alliance and Russia’s Railways, 1891–1914’, Historical Journal, 16 (1973), pp. 777–88; D. Stevenson, ‘War by Timetable? The Railway Race before 1914?’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), pp. 163–94. 59 J.C.O.Röhl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004). 60 K.Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914 (London, 1995). 61 T.Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871–1904 (Annapolis, Md., 1987). 62 D.A.Yerxa, Admirals and Empire: The United States Navy and the Caribbean, 1898–1945 (Columbia, 1991),p. 53. 63 T.G.Otte and K.Neilson (eds), Railways and International Politics: Paths of Empire, 1848–1945 (London, 2006). 64 S.Berger, Inventing The Nation: Germany (London, 2004). 65 G.E.Rothenberg, ‘The Habsburg Army and the Nationality Problem in the Nineteenth Century’, Austrian History Yearbook, 3 (1967), pp. 70–87.

7 Bids for power, 1914–42 1 A.Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (London, 1996). 2 L.E.Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (Basingstoke, 2002); M.Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (London, 2003). 3 W.R.Thompson, ‘A Test of a Theory of Co-Evolution in War: Lengthening the Western Eurasian Military Trajectory’, International History Review, 28 (2006), p. 487. 4 R.F.Hamilton and H.H.Herwig (eds), The Origins of World War I (Cambridge, 2003). 5 M.Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford, 2004). 6 R.T.Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916 (Cambridge, 2005). 7 Z.Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2005). 8 P.Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). 9 K.Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–39 (Cambridge, 2006). 10 M.Adam, The Versailles System and Central Europe (Aldershot, 2004). 11 D.E.Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990). 12 D.P.Silverman, Reconstructing Europe after the Great War (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); R.W.D.Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932: A Study in Politics, Economics, and International Relations (Cambridge, 1987); A.Estevadeordal, B.Frantz and A.M.Taylor, ‘The Rise and Fall of World Trade: 1870–1939’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118 (2003), pp. 359–407. 13 A.Teichova and P.L.Cottrell (eds), International Business and Central Europe, 1918–1939 (Leicester, 1983). 14 S.T.Ross, American War Plans, 1890–1939 (London, 2002).

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15 H.Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, 1971). 16 J.R.Ferris,’ “The Greatest Power on Earth”: Great Britain in the 1920s’, International History Review, 13 (1991), pp. 726–50. 17 J.R.Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Policy 1919–1926 (London, 1989); G.Kennedy, ‘Depression and Security: Aspects Influencing the United States Navy during the Hoover Administration’, Diplomacy and State-craft, 6 (1995), pp. 342–72. 18 A.Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924–1925 (Cambridge, 1996). 19 D.Stone, Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926–1933 (Lawrence, Kans., 2000). 20 P.P.O’Brien (ed.), Technology and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (London, 2001); J.Moretz, The Royal Navy and the Capital Ship in the Interwar Period (London, 2002); T.Wildenberg, ‘In Support of the Battle Line: Gunnery’s Influence on the Development of Carrier Aviation in the US Navy’; T.Hone, ‘The Evolution of Fleet Tactical Doctrine in the US Navy, 1922–1941’, Journal of Military History, 65 (2001), pp. 697–712, 67 (2003), pp. 1107–48. 21 J.P.Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939 (Manchester, 1995). 22 K.Neilson, ‘The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, British Strategic Foreign Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), pp. 651–84. 23 H.G.Gole, The Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934–1940 (Annapolis, Md., 2003). 24 D.E.Showalter, ‘Plans, Weapons, Doctrines: The Strategic Cultures of Interwar Europe’, in R.Chickering and S.Förster (eds), The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 55–81. 25 G.Kennedy, ‘1935: A Snapshot of British Imperial Defence in the Far East’, in G.Kennedy and K.Neilson (eds), Far-Flung Lines: Studies in Imperial Defence in Honour of Donald Mackenzie Schurman (London, 1997), pp. 190–216. 26 H.James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 27 D.Stone, ‘The First Five-Year Plan and the Geography of Soviet Defence Industry’, EuropeAsia Studies, 57 (2005), pp. 1047–63. 28 N.Jordan, ‘Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940’, in J.Blatt (ed.), The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Oxford, 1998), pp. 22–9; W.Murray, ‘May 1940: Contingency and Fragility of the German RMA’, in M.Knox and Murray (eds), The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 154–74. 29 N.Smart, British Strategy and Politics during the Phony War: Before the Balloon Went Up (Westport, Conn., 2003). 30 R.Overy, The Battle (London, 2000). 31 C.P.Stacey, Arms, Men and Governments: The War Policies of Canada 1939–1945 (Ottawa, 1970). 32 A.Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006), p. 665. 33 J.Lukacs, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin (New Haven, Conn., 2006). 34 K.R.Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2003). 35 C.Waters, ‘Australia, the British Empire and the Second World War’, War and Society, 19 (2001), pp. 93–107; J.Gooch, ‘The Politics of Strategy: Great Britain, Australia, and the War against Japan, 1939–1945’, War in History, 10 (2003), pp. 424–47.

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36 M.A.Stoler, Allies in War: Britain and America Against the Axis Powers, 1940–1945 (London, 2005). 37 A.Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London, 2006). 38 P.S.Meilinger, ‘A History of Effects-Based Air Operations’, Journal of Military History, 71 (2007), p. 142; M.Smith, British Air Strategy Between the Wars (Oxford, 1984). 39 N.J.W.Goda, Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path towards America (College Station, Tex., 1998). 40 I.Kershaw, ‘Did Hitler Miss His Chance in 1940?’, in N.Gregor (ed.), Nazism, War and Genocide (Exeter, 2005), pp. 110–30. 41 A.B.Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence, Kans., 2003); R.Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge, 2006). 42 P.Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004). 43 R.Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War (London, 2006), pp. 247–58. 44 B.Fugate, Operation Barbarossa: Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Novato, Calif., 1984); D.M.Glantz, Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia 1941 (Stroud, 2001). 45 R.L.DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II (Westport, Conn., 1991). 46 D.M.Glantz, Kharkov 1942: Anatomy of a Military Disaster through Soviet Eyes (Rockville, Md., 1998). 47 L.Rotundo (ed.), Battle for Stalingrad: The 1943 Soviet General Staff Study (London, 1989). 48 D.P.Barrett and L.N.Shyu (eds), Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945: The Limits of Accommodation (Stanford, Calif., 2001). 49 H.Tohmatsu and H.P.Willmott, A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific, 1921–1941 (Lanham, Md., 2004), pp. 98–100. 50 B.P.Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1940–1942 (Stroud, 2005). 51 W.H.Bartsch, ‘Operation Dovetail: Bungled Guadalcanal Rehearsal, July 1942’, Journal of Military History, 66 (2002), pp. 443–76. 52 K.Sainsbury, The North African Landings 1942: A Strategic Decision (London, 1976); D.Porch, Hitler’s Mediterranean Gamble: The North African and the Mediterranean Campaigns in World War II (London, 2004). 53 S.Howarth and D.Law (eds), The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945 (London, 1994). 54 P.Bairoch, ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European Economic History, 11 (1982), p. 296; K.E.Eiler, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Paterson and the War Effort, 1940–1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); P.A.C.Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940–1945 (Lawrence, Kans., 2004).

8 The fall of empires, 1943–91 1 P.Davies, Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two (Harlow, 2004); T.Brook, Collaboration (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 2 C.S.Sundaram, ‘A Paper Tiger: The Indian National Army in Battle, 1944–1945’, War and Society, 13 (1995), pp. 35–59. 3 B.Fischer, Albania at War, 1939–1945 (London, 1999); O.Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century II (London, 2006); K.C.Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); B.Shepherd, Blood on the Snow: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

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4 J.Stephenson, ‘Germans, Slavs and the Burden of Work in Rural Southern Germany during the Second World War’, in N.Gregor (ed.), Nazism, War and Genocide (Exeter, 2005), pp. 94–109. 5 D.M.Glantz, The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: ‘August Storm’ (London, 2003). 6 H.P.Willmott, The Battle of Leyte Gulf: The Last Fleet Action (Bloomington, Md., 2005). 7 B.P.Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1940–1942 (Stroud, 2005). 8 Wavell to Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Blamey, 25 June 1940, Australian National War Memorial, Canberra, Department of Manuscripts, 3 DRL/6643 1/27. 9 J.Gardiner, Wartime: Britain, 1939–1945 (London, 2004). 10 M.Warren, ‘Focal Point of the Fleet: U.S.Navy Photographic Activities in World War II’, Journal of Military History, 69 (2005), pp. 1045–80. 11 E.Johnson and K.-H.Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History (New York, 2005). 12 G.Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army, 1939–1945 (London, 2005). 13 M.Harrison, The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge, 1998). 14 B.Wegner, ‘The Ideology of Self-Destruction: Hitler and the Choreography of Defeat’, German Historical Institute London. Bulletin, 26 (2004), pp. 18–33. 15 S.H.Newton (ed.), Kursk: The German View. Eyewitness Reports of Operation Citadel by the German Commanders (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 405–6, 441. 16 D.M.Glantz and H.S.Orenstein (eds), Battle for Kursk 1943: The Soviet General Staff Study (London, 1999) and Belorussia 1944: The Soviet General Staff Study (London, 2001). 17 B.Shepherd, ‘Wehrmacht Security Regiments in the Soviet Partisan War, 1943’, European History Quarterly, 33 (2003), pp. 493–529. 18 D.P.Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign (Westport, Conn., 2004); T.R.Moreman, The Jungle, the Japanese and the British Common-wealth Armies at War, 1941–1945: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare (London, 2005). 19 B.F.Meyers, Swift, Silent, and Deadly: Marine Amphibious Reconnaissance in the Pacific, 1942–1945 (Annapolis, Md., 2004). 20 C.Boyd and A.Yoshida, The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II (Annapolis, Md., 1995). 21 A.Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons (New Haven, Conn., 2006). 22 G.L.Symonds, Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History (Oxford, 2005), pp. 197–262. 23 K.B.Williams, Secret Weapon: U.S. Frequency Direction Finding in the Battle of the Atlantic (Annapolis, Md., 1996); H.H.Herwig, ‘Germany and the Battle of the Atlantic’, in R.Chickering, S.Förster and B.Greiner (eds), A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 78–9; B.R.Kroener, R.-D.Müller and H.Umbreit, Germany and the Second World War. V. Organization and Mobilization of the German Sphere of Power. Part 2. Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources, 1942–5 (Oxford, 2003). 24 H.Borg, G.Krebs and D.Vogel, Germany and the Second World War. VII. The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia, 1943–1945 (Oxford, 2006). 25 M.Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 1941–45 (Madison, Wisc., 2004). 26 G.Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (London, 1996). 27 T.B.Allen and N.Polmar, Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan—and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb (New York, 1995); R.B.Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999).

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28 T.Hasegawd, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 29 M.D.Brown, ‘Forcible Population Transfers—a Flawed Legacy or an Unavoidable Necessity in Protracted Ethnic Conflicts? The Case of the Sudeten Germans’, RUSI Journal, 148 (2003), pp. 81–7. 30 M.E.Glantz, DFR and the Soviet Union: The Presidenf’s Battles over Foreign Policy (Lawrence, Kans., 2005). 31 A.J.Rieber, ‘The Crack in the Plaster: Crisis in Romania and the Origins of the Cold War’, Journal of Modern History, 76 (2004), pp. 62–106. 32 J.Lewis, Changing Direction: British Military Planning for Post-War Strategic Defence, 1942–47 (2nd edn, London, 2001). 33 A.J.Prazmowska, Civil War in Poland, 1942–1948 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 143–67. 34 C.A.Bayly and T.Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London, 2005). 35 G.Benton, New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1939–1941 (Richmond, 1999); H.van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London, 2005). 36 N.Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), p. 360; W.R.Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonisation of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (Oxford, 1978); A.J.Whitfield, Hong Kong, Empire, and the Anglo-American Alliance at War, 1941–45 (Basingstoke, 2001). 37 F.L.Loewenheim et al. (eds), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (New York, 1975), p. 459. 38 F.Heinlein, British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945–1963: Scrutinising the Official Mind (London, 2002). 39 I.F.W.Becket, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents since 1750 (London, 2001). 40 A.Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonisation (Harlow, 1994). 41 M.Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford, 2002). 42 C.R.Shrader, The First Helicopter War: Logistics and Mobility in Algeria, 1954–1962 (Westport, Conn., 1999); M.S.Alexander and J.F.V.Keiger (eds), France and the Algerian War, 1954–62: Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy (London, 2002). 43 J.Coates, Suppressing Insurgency: An Analysis of the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1954 (Boulder, Col., 1992). 44 S.Harper, Last Sunset: What Happened in Aden (London, 1978). 45 N.J.Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism., 1955–9 (London, 1996). 46 I.Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (London, 1960), p. 179. 47 S.Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem. Religion, Race and US Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC, 2005). 48 B.Palmer, Intervention in the Caribbean: The Dominican Crisis of 1965 (Lexington, Ky., 1989). 49 M.J.Gilbert (ed.), Why the North Won the Vietnam War (New York, 2002). 50 O.Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge, 2006). 51 P.Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). 52 M.Schain (ed.), The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After (Basingstoke, 2001); P.J.Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II (Fayetteville, NC, 2002). 53 R.W.Rydell and R.Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago, Ill., 2005).

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54 V.d.Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 55 G.N.Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); M.S.Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Bcrkclcy, Calif., 1993). 56 F.J.Gavin, ‘The Myth of Flexible Response: United States Strategy in Europe during the 1960s’, International History Review, 23 (2001), p. 870. 57 R.E.Herzstein, Henry R.Luce, ‘Time’, and the American Crusade in Asia (Cambridge, 2005). 58 H.P.Willmott, When Men Lost Faith in Reason: Reflections on War and Society in the Twentieth Century (Westport, Conn., 2002), pp. 165–6. 59 H.Zimmermann, Money and Security: Troops, Monetary Policy, and West Germany’s Relations with the Untied States and Britain, 1950–1971 (Cambridge, 2002). 60 H.J.Bull-Berg, American International Oil Policy: Causal Factors and Effects (London, 1987). 61 W.I.Cohen, The Asian American Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). 62 M.Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (Oxford, 2000). 63 J.L.Gaddis, The Cold War (London, 2006). 64 J.T.Stanik, El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi (Annapolis, Md., 2003). 65 Willmott, When Men Lost Faith, p. 226. 66 G.A.Ritter, Continuity and Change: Political and Social Developments in Germany after 1945 and 1989/90 (London, 2000), p. 24. 67 R.Okey, The Demise of Communist East Europe: 1989 in Context (London, 2004); D.R.Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985–1991 (Harlow, 2004). 68 M.R.Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge, 2002). 69 K.C.Chen, China’s War against Vietnam: A Military Analysis (Baltimore, Md., 1983) and China’s War with Vietnam, 1979: Issues, Decisions, and Implications (Stanford, Calif., 1987). 70 J.Becker and F.Knipping (eds), Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in a Postwar World 1945–1950 (Berlin, 1986). 71 R.J.Granieri, The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 (New York, 2003). 72 D.Heater, The Idea of European Unity (Leicester, 1992), pp. 152–3. 73 H.Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham, NC, 2004). 74 A.J.Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany 1918–1963 (Oxford, 1994). 75 J.G.Giauque, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganisation of Western Europe, 1955–1963 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). 76 E.Pond, Beyond the World: Germany’s Road to Unification (London, 1993); S.F.Szabo, The Diplomacy of German Unification (New York, 1993); T.Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005), p. 640. 77 R.Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003).

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9 American hegemony, 1991–2007? 1 P.Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSSR from 1945 (London, 2003). 2 J.G.Mathers, The Russian Nuclear Shield from Stalin to Yeltsin: The Cold War and Beyond (Basingstoke, 2000). 3 O.Coté, ‘The Trident and the Triad: Collecting the D-5 Dividend’, International Security, 16 (1991), pp. 117–45. 4 S.A.Schuker, ‘A Sea Change in the Atlantic Economy? How the West Pulled Ahead of the Rest and Why It May Cease to Do So’, in W.A.Hay and H.Sicherman (eds), Is There Still a West? The Future of the Atlantic Alliance (Columbia, Miss., 2007), pp. 97–9. 5 Y.Huang, Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform Era (Cambridge, 2002). 6 D.M.Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing US—China Relations, 1989–2000 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001). 7 A.J.Bacevich and E.A.Cohen (eds), War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (NewYork, 2002). 8 C.S.Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History (London, 2002). 9 M.Knights, Cradle of Conflict: Iraq and the Birth of the Modern US Military (Annapolis, Md., 2005). 10 H.Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival, 47 (2005), p. 51. 11 F.Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (London, 2006). 12 P.Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York, 1993), p. 19. 13 R.Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003). 14 J.Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through Iranscam (New York, 1986). 15 A.Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); N.Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London, 2004); C.Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 2004). 16 I.H.Daalder and J.M.Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC, 2003); C.Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York, 2003).

10 Into the future 1 V.Smil, ‘Worrying about the Environment’, International History Review, 26 (2004), p. 798. 2 See also J.Bulloch and A.Darwish, Water Wars: Coming Conflicts in the Middle East (London, 1993); A.Sofer, Rivers of Fire: The Conflict over Water in the Middle East (Lanham, Md., 1999). 3 S.R.Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

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4 G.M.Hahn, Russia’s Islamic Threat (New Haven, Conn., 2007). 5 C.Barnett, ‘Imperial Overstretch from Dr. Arnold to Mr. Blair’, RUSI Journal (August 2005); J.Black, ‘A Post-Imperial Power? Britain and the Royal Navy’, Orbis, 49 (2005), pp. 353–65. 6 A.Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York, 2003). 7 T.Negash and K.Tronvoll, Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (Oxford, 2000). 8 R.Harkavy and S.Neumann, Warfare and the Third World (Basingstoke, 2001). 9 S.P.Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996). See, however, G.Chiozza, ‘Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Evidence from Patterns of International Conflict Involvement, 1946–97’, Journal of Peace Research, 39 (2002), pp. 711–34. 10 N.Gould-Davies, ‘Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics during the Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 1 (1999), pp. 90–109. 11 M.Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (Cambridge, 2006). 12 M.Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven, Conn., 2004). 13 S.Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001). 14 J.Bailey, Great Power Strategy in Asia: Empire, Culture and Trade, 1905–2005 (London, 2007), esp. pp. 214–16. 15 R.Cobbold, ‘Comment’, Royal United Services Institute Journal, 151, 6 (2006), p. 6. 16 J.Levy, ‘Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China’. I would like to thank Jack Levy for sending me a copy of this paper; D.Rapkin and W.R.Thompson, ‘Power Transition, Challenge, and the (Re)Emergence of China’, International Interactions, 29, 4 (2003), pp. 315–42; A.I.Friedberg, ‘The Future of US China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable’, International Security, 30, 2 (2005), pp. 7–45; A.Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge: China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford, Calif., 2005). 17 J.Hempson-Jones and A.Neill, ‘Managing a Rising Power: Strains in US China Policy’, RUSI Journal, 151, 3 (June 2006), pp. 40–5. 18 D.McDonough, ‘The US Nuclear Shift to the Pacific’, RUSI Journal, 151, 2 (April 2006), p. 66. 19 D.Lennox, ‘WMD and Missile Proliferation: Threats or Just Risks’, RUSI Journal, 151, 2 (April 2006), p. 57. 20 W.A.McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985).

11 Conclusions 1 D.Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000). 2 J.Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World (New Haven, Conn., 2007). 3 L.and M.Frey,’ “The Reign of the Charlatans is Over”: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice’, Journal of Modern History, 65 (1993), pp. 706–44.

Selected further reading Necessarily, this is a highly selective list. Other works can be approached through the bibliographies and footnotes of these books. Alcock, S.E. et al. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeologyand History (Cambridge, 2001). Beckett, I.F.W., Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London, 2001). Beckett, I.F.W., The Great War, 1914–1918 (Harlow, 2001). Black, J., Rethinking Military History (London, 2004). Black, J., The British Seaborne Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2004). Cable, J., The Political Influence of Naval Force in History (Basingstoke, 1998). Cassidy, R., Peacekeeping in the Abyss: British and American Doctrine and Practice after the Cold War (Westport, Conn., 2004). Clayton, A., Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa since 1950 (London, 1999). Cooper, R.G.S., The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy (Cambridge, 2004). Duchhardt, H., Balance of Power and Pentarchie, 1700–1785 (Paderborn, 1997). Glete, J., Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500– 1860 (Stockholm, 1993). Gray, G.S., The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order (Lexington, Ky., 2004). Headrick, D.R., When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 2000). Holsti, K.J., Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order (Cambridge, 1991). Israel J., The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995). Jervis, R., Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1976). Johnston, A.L., Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ, 1995). Kamen, H., Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492–1763 (London, 2002). Kennedy, P., The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London, 1988). Kenny, K. (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004). Koening, W.J., The Burmese Policy, 1752–1819 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990). Liulevicius, V.G., War Land on the Eastern Front (Cambridge, 2000). Lundestad, G. (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oslo, 1994). McCusker, J.J. and Morgan, K. (eds), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, 2000). Manning, P., Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York, 2003). Mearsheimer, J.J., The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, 2001). Miles, W.S., Hausaland Divided: Capitalism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger (Ithaca, NY, 1994). Mokyr, J., The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, 1990). Mueller, J., The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY, 2004). Murray, W. and Millett, A.R., A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Omissi, D.E., Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990).

Selected further reading

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Pomeranz, K., The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000). Schroeder, P.W., The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994). Sen, S., Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, Pa., 1998). Sondhaus, L., Naval Warfare, 1815–1914 (London, 2000). Weinberg, G., A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994). Wesseling, H.L., The European Colonial Empires, 1815–1919 (London, 2004). Winichakul, T., Siam Mapped: A History of Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).

Index Abbas Mirz, Crown Prince 100 Adal (Horn of Africa) 34 Aden (South Yemen) 174, 175 Afghanistan 82, 118, 119, 189, 200, 209, 215, 237 Africa 9, 127, 130, 170, 200, 208, 215 Akbar the Great 49 Aksum 22 al-Qaeda 208, 209 al-Sadr, Muqtada 211 Alaska 130 Alaung-hpaya of Burma 80 Albania 138, 160 Alcazarquivir, Battle of (1578) 53 Alexander, Duke of Parma 50 Alexander the Great 32 Alexander I 90 Algeria 119–20, 173–4 Algiers 96–7 Aman-Allah Khan, Vali of Ardalan 100 American Civil War (1861–5) 11, 116, 117, 130 American War of Independence (1775–83) 89, 91, 94, 104, 109 Andrianampoinimerina 100 Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) 126 Angola 178, 179 Anna Ivanovna 73 Anne, Queen 86 Aqqoyunlu Confederacy 46 Arbenz, Jacobo 178 Arnold, Benedict 103 Asaf Jah, Nizam of Hyderabad 81 Aurangzeb 81 Australia 181 Austria 17, 20, 23, 53, 138, 140 Aztecs 28 Babur the Conqueror 48–9 Balkans 209 Barbarossa, Hayreddin 36 Barre, Raymond 196 Belgium 179, 195 Bevin, Ernest 194 bin Laden, Osama 208

Index Blair, Tony 210 Blenheim, Battle of (1704) 85 Boer War (1899–1902) 9, 114, 133 Bolivia 179 Bosnia 236 Boxer Rising (1900) 127, 132 Brandling, Charles 93 Brazil 48, 124, 178–9 Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) 180, 186 Brezhnev, Leonid 192 Britain 19; and agriculture 92; and coal 92–3; collapse of empire 159; and the Commonwealth 172; comparison with Chinese development 112–13; conflicts with France 109–10; contribution to First World War 139, 143; and culture 118; and decline in self-confidence 175; defeats in Far East 22; and the Depression 150; and development of government 86; dominance of 90–1; and economic transformation 91–2; and European conflicts 85–6, 87; expansion of 124; failures in Eastern Mediterranean 96–7; and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ 86; and ideology 114; and imperial consolidation 145; and India 81, 95–6, 113–14, 122–3; and industrial activity 92–3; inter-war 20; and international competition 86; and Jacobite rebellions 83; joins EEC 196; as leading naval power 128; liberal tradition in 114–15, 144; and loss of empire 74–5, 169, 171–2; and maritime power 84, 85; and national identity 87; and North American settlement 84–5, 86; and opposition to standing army 103; and Pax Britannica 97; and politics/strategic choice 91; and power preservation 198; as principal nation 88; production/consumption in 92, 129–30; setbacks to 57; and South Asia 99; and steam engines 93;

227

Index

228

and strategic culture 87–8; and strategic overreach 128; and support for trade/colonies 85; tariff reform in 14; and technological development 118; tensions with USA 175; and union with Scotland 86–7; and use of soft power 234–5 Bulgaria 160, 204 Bulge, Battle of (1944) 166–7 Burma see Myanmar Burr, Aaron 103 Bush, George H.W. 189 Bush, George W. 206, 211 Byzantium (Eastern Roman Empire) 2, 5 Cabot, John 84 Cambodia 177 Canada 23, 103, 109, 124, 128, 151, 181, 205 Carter Doctrine (1980) 187 Carter, Jimmy 187 Carville, James 185 Castro, Fidel 178 Catherine the Great 102 Central Asia 17 Chad 188 Chamberlain, Neville 152 Chamberlayne, John 87–8 Charles II 85 Charles V 13, 27–8, 30, 33–4, 35, 36, 47, 48, 50 Charles VIII 27 Charles XII 62 Chávez, President 215 Chile 124, 125 China, and abandonment of expeditions to Indian Ocean 33; and ability to resist European pressures 81–2; anti- Western anger in 132–3; apparent unification of 145; and assumptions concerning international relations 42; attacks on the Dutch 53–4; civil war in 118; colonial tendencies 23; comparison with British development 112–13; conflict with Japan 55–6; conquered by Manchu 46; and cooperation 82–3; crises in 55–6; Cultural Revolution 14; decline of 89; demise of Communism in 193; divide and rule strategy 78;

Index

229

expansionist tendencies 2, 42–3, 71–2, 82, 98; and frontier rebellions 120; geo-cultural aspects 43–4; GNP 17; government in 112; as great power 3, 177, 194, 232–3; growth of 193–4; historical neglect of 2; and internal stability 238; Japanese attacks on 169; link with America 189, 202, 204, 212–14; link with Britain 88; market reforms in 203–4; military development 110–12, 231; and the Mongols 30, 31, 44; New Army in 133; and non-use of coal 93; political context 111–12; population of 112; and possible confrontation with India 230; and power/social control 217; quest for resources 9, 231–2; railways in 121; rivalries in 61–2; role of contingency in 192; self-image 145; Self-strengthening Movement in 113, 116, 120, 123; and sense of threat 44; space programme 209; success of 159; and use of soft power 235; Westernization of 119, 120, 121 Chinese Civil War (1946–49) 177, 182 Chinggis Khan 30, 32, 46 Churchill, Sir Winston 170, 171 clash of civilizations 229–30 Clinton, Bill 185, 200 Clive, Robert 87 Cobbett, William 8–9 Cold War 15; and containment strategy 198; end of 2, 194; and fall of colonial empires 169–70; and great power status 208; and guerrilla (proxy) struggles 177–9; maritime importance 232; and strategic advantage/alliances 122, 135, 185, 205, 235; and the Third World 122, 175–9; and US-Soviet Union competition 178 colonialism 127, 130, 169–75 Communism 137, 139, 144, 169–70, 178, 180, 182–4, 188, 189, 190, 191–2, 204 Congo 179

Index

230

Congolese National Movement 179 Crete 53 Crimean War (1853–6) 116 Croatia 160 Cromwell, Oliver 85, 103 Crusades 28 Cuba 178–9, 188 Czech Republic 204 De Gaulle, Charles 196 Delors, Jacques 197 Deng Xiaoping 193, 203 Denmark 194, 196 Depression 148–51 Devlet Kuchum, Khan 44 Dickens, Charles 10 Dominican Republic 176 Dunmore, John, 4th Earl of 107 Durranis of Afghanistan 81 Dutch 2, 22, 159; Chinese attacks on 53–4; Crisis (1787) 109; Revolt 38, 50; setbacks to 58 Dutch East Indies 159, 161 Dutch West India Company 63 East Asia 203, 212, 213, 218, 236 East India Company 84, 96, 98, 106 Eastern Europe 172 Eaton, William 106 Eden, Anthony 168 Egypt 9, 10, 95, 97–8, 111, 112, 116, 119, 178, 181 El Salvador 205 Elizabeth I 29, 38 environment, demographic problems 223–4, 225, 228–9; and ethnic difference 226–8; and global warming 222–3; and the military/internal controls 225–8; and political change 222; and resource competition 223–4; and social cohesion 224–5; and water wars 223; worldwide crisis 222 Erhard, Ludwig 195 Erzberger, Matthias 127 Ethiopia 22, 34, 116, 117, 119 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) 195 European Defence Community (EDC) 195

Index

231

European Economic Community (EEC) 194–7 European expansion, assessment of progress 33–4; and changing state system 27–30; and compromise 83–4; and conflict with non-Western powers 95–8; and cooperation/alliances 50, 77–8; and the Crusades 28; difficulties in 77; and economic development 34; effect of Second World War on 169–70; and ethnic dimension of cooperation 83; external threats/conflicts 52–5; and fall of empires 169–75; and governmental support 77; and issues of prioritization 75; and land settlement 77–8; and maintenance of power 172; and maritime strength/capability 28–9, 55, 75–6; and new trade routes 27–8, 32–3; and non-military technology 99; and political cooperation 83; and population/economic growth 28; power relationships/conflict 89–90; and revival of Europe 194–7; and strengths/weaknesses of states 52; and trade 78 European Union (EU) 194, 218 Falkland Islands 23 Far East 10, 22 Ferdinand of Aragon 39 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor 30, 36 Fillmore, Millard 113 First World War 94, 120, 125, 126, 133, 137, 138, 139–40, 163, 183 Fleming, Ian, ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ 175 Fouchet Plan (1961) 196 France 19, 21–2, 24, 109; anti-clericalism in 14; and Austria 61; and Britain 85, 86, 109–10; conflicts with 61, 85, 86, 94, 109–10; contribution to First World War 139; decline of 95; and destruction of Libyan air force 188; expansion of 83, 124, 125–6; and French Revolution 12, 20, 91; and imperial consolidation 145; involvement in Egypt 98; and loss of empire 169, 170, 172–4; as member of EEC 195, 196–7; Napoleonic legacy 90–1, 93–5

Index

232

Francis I 90 Francis II 48 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) 121, 134 Frederick the Great 73, 80, 94 Frederick William III 90 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) 173–4 Front Islamique du Salut 174 Fulani 101 Gattinara, Mercurino 33 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT) 180 George I 103 George II 103 George III 103 George, Lord Macartney 88 Germany 19, 21, 22; in Africa 127; Allied occupations of 183; ambitions of 153–6; bid for power 138; Colonial League in 121; and Communism 184; and the Depression 149; economic capability 131–2; explanations of failure 163–4; and fall of Nazi empire 159, 160–8; and First World War 140; inter-war 20; intervention in 202; and land seizure 140; as member of EEC 195–6; militarism of 132, 140; overreach in 203; post-war allied occupation 167–8; reunification of 190, 197; rise of 128; and spread of Communism 137 Gibbon, Edward 76 Giddens, Anthony 9 Gorbachev, Mikhail 189–90, 191 Gordon, Charles 119 Gosplan 191 Gragn, Iman Ahmad 34 great powers, caveats on interpretation 11–14; and civilizations 233; and coalitions/alliances 11, 13, 21, 82–4, 215, 235–7; and competition 16, 17; conditional nature of 237; and confrontation thesis 169; and culture 135, 235–6; decline/disenchantment 22–3;

Index

233

differing definitions 1, 7–8; and economic factors 1, 5–6, 11–12, 20, 26, 234; effect of war on 172; and empire 7, 172–3; and ethnic theme 236; exclusions from 36; fall of 169; and fitness for purpose 58; and geopolitics/geographical destiny 21; global bids for 34; and governance 46–50; and honour, status, prestige 23–4; and identity 22, 45–6; and ideology/culture 9, 12–13, 14–15, 17–18, 19, 21–2, 102; and imperial dominance 171; and internal consent, coordination, cooperation 13–14; and internal stability 238; and Kennedy thesis 1–26; and leaders 80; and limited wars 10; materialist perspective 1, 8–14, 15–26; and measurement of power 79–80; and military factors 9, 15–16, 26, 73; and moods of opinion 236–7; multifaceted approach to 234–8; and multipolarity 237–8; navalist approach 3–4, 6; and non-western states 2–3; and organization/institutions 12; and overreach 5, 15, 17, 37–51; and perception 24–5, 36; and policy 1, 25–6; and power relationships 80–2; and prediction 20; and problem of presentism 1–2; and questions of relevance 93–5; and racial self-confidence 22; and resource acquisition 9–10; rise of 71–8; and role of consensus 78–9; shifting meanings of 7; and soft power 234–5; and state behaviour 19; and study of failure 93–5; and technology 18–19, 26; and trade 6; and truth by declaration 6–7; underpinnings of 8–9; and use of data on 17; Western Europe as key player 33–4 Greece 194, 196 Greenspan, Alan 214

Index

234

Guetemala 178 Guevara, Che 179 Gulf War (1990–1) 197, 208 Gustavus Adolf 39 Habsburg Empire, competing interests/goals 13; financial considerations 24; opposition to 29–30, 58; and the Ottomans 3, 52, 53; and strategic overreach 38; support for 50 Haidar Ali 81 Haiti 102, 103, 107, 109, 144 Hamilton, Alexander 105 Hamilton, Richard 6 Handel, George Frederick 87 Hanseatic League 47 Hart, Basil Liddell 5 Hausa 101 Hawaii 89, 131 Hayes, Rutherford 131 Henry IV of France 29, 38 Henry VIII 29, 48 Hereros 127 Himmler, Heinrich 167 Hitler, Adolf 15, 94, 142, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158, 163, 167 Honduras 178 Hong Kong 122, 157, 161, 170, 213 Hottentot election (1907) 127 Hu Jintao, President 231 Hukbalahap movement 178 Hungary 172, 191, 204, 237 Huns 5 Hussein, Saddam 31, 187, 200, 210, 211 Il-Khanid Empire 32 imperial expansion 73–9 Imperial Geographical Society (Russia) 121 imperial power 82 imperialism 116, 120, 121–2, 124 Incas 28 India, British in 10, 87, 89, 99, 122–3; economic liberalization in 202–3; as independent 171; and Kashmir 23, 231; link with America 232; and possible confrontation with China 230; and power/social control 217; support in Second World War 128, 160–1 Indian Mutiny (1857–59) 113–14, 122 Indian National Congress 136

Index Indian Ocean 36–7, 38, 61, 75, 122 Indo-China 173 Indonesia 177, 202 Industrial Revolution 8–9, 10, 87, 91, 92–3 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 180 Inuit 28 Iran 179, 187, 205, 231, 232, 233 Iraq 11, 187, 200, 205, 210–12, 221 Ireland 50, 57, 102, 152, 196 Islam 2, 74; conflict with 33–4; and the Ottomans 35; and warfare within 97–8; and Western power 96 Isma’il 34 Israel 182 Italian Wars (1594–1559) 27 Italy 138, 194, 195 Ivan IV 77 Jackson, Andrew 106, 107 Jacobites 85–6 James I (and VI of Scotland) 53 James II (and VII of Scotland) 86 Japan, attack on China 169; attacks on Portuguese 53; banking crisis 202; bid for power 138; and Boxer uprising 127; and colonization strategies 119–20; conflict with China 55–6; and East Asian economic growth 186–7; explanations of failure 164; fall of empire 159, 160–8, 179; and fighting quality 164–6; and German expansion 130; as great power 230; historical neglect of 2; and hostility to Westerners 54; imperialism of 116; and industrial strength 162; intervention in 202; invasion of Manchuria 146; and Korean conflicts 40; and land seizure 140; and link with America 186–7, 212, 213, 232; and link with Nazi Germany 160; manpower shortage 125; modernization/state-building in 136; morale in 12; opening up of 89, 113;

235

Index

236

policy/planning flaws 166; post-war loss of land 168; and racial superiority 161; response to Christianity/internationalism 54; as revisionist regime 24; and role of resources 161–2; and Second World War 109, 128, 141, 151, 156–7; and strategic overreach 203; support for 160; and under-estimation of Americans 164–6; and use of atom bombs 167; war-time occupations 161 Jay’s Treaty (1812) 110 Jefferson, Thomas 93, 105–6 Jenkins’ Ear, War of (1743–48) 87 John George I of Saxony 30 John Paul II, Pope 188 Johnson, Lyndon B. 179, 185 Joint Military Advisory Group (USA) 178 Jurchin Jin Empire 30 Kamehameha 89 Kanagawa, Treaty of (1854) 113 Kangxi 80 Kara Mahmoud 112 Karnal, Battle of (1739) 81 Kashmir 23, 122, 231 Kennedy, John F. 196 Kennedy, Paul 1–26, 34, 169, 185, 191, 197, 200, 202–3, 214, 236, 238 Kenya 174 Keynes, John Maynard 150 Khrushchev, Nikita 190, 191 Kipling, Rudyard 10 Knox, Henry 104 Korea 40, 56, 113 Korean War (1950–3) 176, 178, 180, 182–3, 184 Kubilai Khan 32 Kuwait 182, 187, 197 Laos 177 Latin America 23, 124–5, 143, 144, 177, 181, 208 Latin American Wars of Independence 95, 124 League of Nations 139, 142, 143 Lepanto, Battle of (1571) 42, 52 Leyte Gulf, Battle of (1944) 166 Li Zicheng 56 Libya 188 Lincoln, Abraham 11 Lorge, Peter 33 Lotus Rebellion (1796–1805) 111 Louis II of Hungary 35

Index

237

Louis XIV 12, 50, 60, 83 Louis XV 94 Loutherbourg, Philip James de 8 Lumumba, Patrice 179 Lundestad, Geir 5 Macmillan, Harold 175 Madeira 48 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 3, 131 Maji Maji rising 127 Malaya 128, 157, 161, 174 Malaysia 203 Mamelukes 39 Manchu dynasty 49, 56, 81, 82–3, 111, 132–3 Manchuria 145, 146 Mao Zedong 169, 177, 193, 203 Maori wars (1820s) 89 maps 65–9 maritime power 5, 6, 9, 52; and America 109; and Asian development 32–3; and Britain 84, 85, 118, 128; expansion of 33; and importance of overland trade routes 32; and limitations on transoceanic shipping 33; marginality of 38; and Oriental states 40; and overreach 40; and the Second World War 153; and technological developments 47, 48, 129; and use of submarines 166; and Western European expansion 30, 34, 75–6 Marlborough, John, 1st Duke of 85 Marshall Plan 180, 185 Mary, Queen of Scots 48 Mary Tudor 48 Mau-Mau 174 Mauritius Expedition (1810) 106 Maximilian, Emperor 125 Mearsheimer, John 19 Mehmed II 35 Mehmet Ali 97 Meiji Restoration (1868) 113, 116, 117 Messina conferences (1955/1956) 195 Mexican-American War (1846–8) 124 Mexico 108, 109, 201, 205 Middle East 10, 11, 120, 135, 143, 144, 161, 186, 200, 208, 211, 215, 236 Midway, Battle of (1942) 164–5 military power 9, 15–16, 26, 73; Chinese success 110–12; choices 146–8;

Index

238

and democracy effect 221–2; as deterrent 221; and goals/strategic cultures 146–7; inter-war problems 148; on land 77; and non-Western borrowings 98–101; and Ottoman reform 99–100; and procurement/prioritization 146–7; and proficiency 146; Spanish professionalism/resilience 58–9; and technology 159–60; and trade 221; and US 102–6; Western superiority 116–17 Ming dynasty 32, 49, 55 Mitterand, Fra ois 196–7 Mobutu, Joseph 179 modernity 73, 120–1 Möngke Khan 31, 32 Mongol Empire 3, 81; and conquest of China 30, 31; decision not to move into Europe 30; decline/fall of 31–2; and economic difficulties 32; internal divisions 32; as starting point for continuous global history 30; and tidal-wave process of conquest 31; and treaty with China 44 Mongolia 126 Monroe Doctrine (1823) 110 Monroe, James 107 Morocco 53, 125, 127 Mughal Empire, attacks on the English 53; and capture of Sultanate of Delhi 46; conflict with Safavids 3; conservatism of 2; decline/collapse of 81, 122–3; and dynastic continuity 48–9; expansion of 74; and government/trade conflicts 41; population size 49; setbacks to 57; unity of 32 Mühlberg, Battle of (1547) 50 Muslims 173 Mussolini, Benito 22, 138 Myanmar (Burma) 111, 119, 120, 128, 161, 163, 165, 231 9/11 200, 208, 209, 210 Nadir Shah 73, 80 Nama 127

Index

239

Napoleon Bonaparte, and accommodation to dominant power 50; Continental ambitions 90–1; and control of the military 102, 103; defeat of 90; as a failure 93–5; fate of 80; as military ruler 73, 80; and Spanish invasion 23, 111 Napoleon III 124–5 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 11, 181 navy see maritime power Nawab of Bengal 81 Nazi Germany 189; defections from/opposition to 160; fall of 160–8; and industrial strength 162; and leadership errors/flaws 161, 163–4, 166–7; and link with Japan 160; policy/planning flaws 166; and post-war Allied occupations 167–8; and propaganda/Home Front 162–3; and racial superiority 161; and repression of disaffection/defeatism 167; and responsibility for defeat 163; and socio-political changes 167–8; and unconditional surrender 168, see also Germany Nehru, Jawaharlal 181 New Guinea 161 New World Empires 58, 75–6, 84–5, 124 New Zealand 89, 130 Nguyen Ahn 100 Nixon, Richard 185, 186 non-Western powers 2–3, 89; border with the West 52–3; comparison with the West 40–51; conflict with 95–8; fate of 118; influence of the West on 95–101; and local cooperation/consent 74; and map-making 68, 69; and mercantile networks 42; military borrowings 98–101; and naval resilience 42; and the New World 76; and paradigm-diffusion model 100–1; and power relationships 80–2; and role of leaders 80; and strategic overreach 42–6; and Western interventions/control 119–20;

Index

240

and Western success 123–4; Westernization of 116, 117–18, see also named countries eg China Nootka Sound Crisis (1790) 109 Nördlingen, Battle of (1634) 50 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 205 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 182, 185, 194–5, 196, 200, 215 North Korea 188, 206, 220, 233 North Vietnam 8 Norway 194 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 206, 219 Oman 179 Operation Bagration (1944) 167 Operation Barbarossa (1941) 153 Operation Torch (1942) 157 Operation Uranus (1942) 156 Opium Wars 89, 112, 113, 122 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 186 Orientalism 3 Orwell, George 3 Ottoman Empire, conservatism of 2; decline/defeat of 53, 96, 100, 117; defeat/decline of 120; established view of 34; European conflicts 3, 52–3; expansion of 35–6, 38, 74; failures of 76–7; as great power 1, 33; Greek rebellion against 98; in Horn of Africa 37; in the Indian Ocean 36–7, 38; as key Islamic empire 35; and military reform 99–100; naval presence 38; non-interference in Western Europe 77; perception of 42; population size 49; rebellions in 112; religious minorities in 41, 44; resurgence of 61; and role of the military 17; and Russian expansion 17; and the Safavids 3; as success/failure 37; and treaty boundaries 111; Turco-Islamic definition of 236; wealth of 35 Oudenaarde, Battle of (1708) 85

Index

241

Pakistan 232 Panama Canal 131, 135 Panipat, Third Battle of (1761) 82 Paraguay 124 Parker, Geoffrey 38 Peloponesian War (431–404 BC) 40 Penn, William 85 Perry, Matthew 113 Persia 46, 53, 73–5, 81, 97, 116, 117, 119 Peru 124 Peter the Great 15, 73, 80, 83 Peter II 73 Philip of Hesse 30 Philip II 13, 37, 38, 45, 48, 50, 53, 153 Philippines 127, 131, 157, 165–6, 178 Plassey, Battle of (1757) 87 Poland 34, 102, 137, 143, 144, 152, 154, 161, 190, 204 Pomeranz, Kenneth 123–4 Portugal 54, 61, 130, 169, 194 power bids, and aftermath of First World War 139–40; and American passivity 145; and assertion of nationalism 142; challenges 142; and China, Russia, Japan 145–6; and the Depression 148–51; diplomatic dimension 140–1; and economic factors 144; and global positioning 140; and imperial consolidation/strengthening 145; main players 138–9; and military choices 146–8; and military weakness 144; operational factors 138; and overreach 143; and pursuit of territorial gain 138; and question of which war/type of war 143; and resources 137–42; and the Second World War 151–8; and shifts in power 139; and uncertainty of inter-war period 142 Prussia 17, 20, 21 Putin, Vladimir 205 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) 219 Quianlong 80 Radama 100 Raeder, Admiral 166 railways 135 Ranjit Singh 100 Rapid Deployment Task Force 187

Index Reagan, Ronald 15, 170, 187, 187–8, 189, 209 Reformation 29, 51 religion 55; defeat of oppositions to 50; and perception of menace 45; and treatment of minorities 41, 44–5 Renaissance 27 resources, American 139–40; and First World War 138; and power politics 137–8; quest for 9, 231–2; role of 161–2; and Second World War 141–2, 151–2; and territorial gain 138, 140 Restraint of Appeals, Act of (1533) 29 Revolution in Military Aflfairs (RMA) 159, 206–8 Ribbentrop-Molotov (Nazi-Soviet) Pact (1939) 152 Robertson, William 27 Roman Empire 13, 134 Romania 204 Rome, Treaty of (1957) 195 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 160, 168, 170, 171 Rostow, W.W. 15 Russia, conflicts with 54–5; cooperation/alliances 19, 231; and destruction of Polish independence 102; expansion of 54, 72–3, 77, 121, 125; failures of 74, 77; fall of 18; financial problems 125; and First World War 140; and industrial production/cultural change 15–16; interests in Far East 145–6; and internal role of the military 17; and military capability 199, 209; and the Ottomans 53; in Persia 74–5; and post-Communist decline 204–5; revolution in 137, 139; rise to power 12; and Saddam regime 210; and Second World War 141; successes of 97; threats to 62; Trans-Siberian railway 121; and treaty boundaries 111; and world trade 144, see also Soviet Union Russo-Japanese treaties (1907–16) 126 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 125 Rwanda 200

242

Index Safavids 3, 34, 35, 41, 46, 56, 81, 118 Sahy’s Rebellion (1786–7) 108 Sassanid Persia 5 Saud dynasty 138 Scientific Revolution 63–5 Sebastian, King 53 Second World War, British involvement in 152–3; and diplomacy 152; and fall of empires 159–72; and German ambitions 153–6; and ideology 8, 22, 24; impact on Japan/Nazi Germany 160–9; and Japan 151, 156–7; preparation for 151; and racial self-confidence 22; resource-based approach to 141–2, 151–2; and Soviet Union 154–6; and study of failure 94; and territorial borders 138; uncertain character of 141; and United States 157–8 Selim I, the Grim 35, 36, 46 Serbia 14, 133, 137, 138 Seven Years’ War (1756–63) 77, 86, 94 Seward, William 130–1 Shaka 101 Shakarkhera, Battle of (1724) 81 Shanghai Co-Operation Organization 232 Siam 119 Siberia 125 Singapore 157 Single Integrated Operating Plan (1998) 204 Sino-Soviet War (1929) 145 slave trade 62–3, 85, 97, 99, 100, 114–15, 119 Slovenia 204 Smoot-Hawley Act (1930) 148 Society for German Colonisation 121 Somalia (Somaliland) 116, 200, 215 Song Empire 30 South Africa 101, 133 South Asia 2, 17 South Korea 182, 203, 212, 213 South-East Asia 10, 76, 101, 111, 177, 202 Soviet Union 8, 16, 22, 142, 159; achievements in Africa 170; attack on Japan 161; collapse of 159, 200; and consent of the populace 192–3; contrast with the West 189; and democratization of Communism 192;

243

Index

244

and the Depression 149–50; economic difficulties 191; fall of empire 170, 188–93; and German reunification 190; gulags in 161; ideological confrontations 183; imperial power of 172; as military super-power 190–1; and nationalism 193; and opposition to Communist regimes 190; policy changes in 189–90; possible conflict with 189; post-war land transfers 168; and propaganda 162–3; role of contingency in 192; and Second World War 154–6; speed of collapse 192; weakness of government in 192–3, see also Russia Spain, commercial ventures 60; cooperation/alliances 50, 109; and end of Francoist regime 193; as great power 23, 234; military professionalism/resilience of 58–9; overreach of 38, 39–40; and reconciliation between crowns/social elites 59; setbacks to 57, 59–60; and use of soft power 234, 235 Spanish Succession, War of (1701–14) 85 Spanish-American War (1898) 127 Special Operations Forces (SOF) 219 Stalin, Joseph 16, 152, 154, 168 strategic culture 43–5, 135, 146–7 strategic overreach 191; and America 180, 188, 197, 200; and consent/cooperation 49–50, 51; consequences of 203; and culture 43–4, 45; and dynastic continuity 48–9; and Europe 47–50; and expansionist tendencies 42–3; and geopolitical dominance 42, 46; and governance 46; and identity 45–6; and internal/external concept 45–6; as key feature 37; and naval capability 40; and non-Western states 42–6; perception of 37–8, 39–40; problems with 38–9; and religion/ideology 44–5, 51; and resources in 1920s 143;

Index and rising nationalism 134; and route to modernity 47; and Second World War 153; and sense of threat 44; and state direction/initiatives 41; and strength of states 49; and trade/mercantile interests 41, 42, 47–8; as unsuccessful 38; and West/non-West contrast 40–51 Sudan 125, 178, 231 Suez Crisis (1956) 10, 135, 175, 195 Suleiman the Magnificent 35, 46 Surajah Dowla, Nawab of Bengal 87 Swedish African Company 62–3 Szapolyai, János 36 Tabkin Kwotto, Battle of (1804) 101 Tahmasp, Shah of Persia 73 Taiping Rebellion 118 Taiwan 182, 192, 204, 212, 213, 232 Taliban 209 Tashin of Siam 80 Tatars 44 technology 159–60 terrorism 210, 215 Thailand 177 Thatcher, Margaret 188 Third World 122, 154; and the Cold War 175–9 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) 29, 39, 53, 61, 121 Three Feudatories (1674–81) 56, 61, 83 Tibet 2, 23, 159, 192 Timur 32 Tipu Sultan 81 Tongking 111 Toqtamish 32 trade, British successes 85; commercial networks 47–8; European impact on 34; importance of silk roads 32; international 128; link with violence/privateering 41; Mongol re-routing of 32; overland/maritime comparison 32–3; and rights to free trade 119; routes 27–8 Triple Alliances 133 Truman, Harry S. 175, 182 Turkey 140, 194, see also Ottoman Empire

245

Index

246

United Nations (UN) 15, 179, 200, 210, 219 United Provinces 22 United States 10–11, 15, 18, 21, 22; and aftermath of 1812–15 War 107–9; assertive foreign policy stance 187; challenges to 236–7; character of power of 101–10; and China 202, 204, 212–14; civil war in 116, 117; and Communist advance 182–3, 188; concern/anger over policies of 183; conflict with Britain 103–4; containment/engagement strategies 231, 232; contribution to First World War 139, 143; as crucial to the ‘long peace’ 182; cultural appeal of 181, 182; and cultural misperceptions 210; current-account deficit in 214; and defence expenditure 209, 214–15; development of 102; different growth rates in 186; domestic/international loss of confidence in 184; early presence in the Mediterranean 106; economy of 131–2, 144, 181–2, 184, 185–6, 201–3, 213; and the EEC 196; European influence on 103–10; expansionist tendencies 107, 108–9, 113, 130–2; and external threats/anxieties 215–17; and fall of Napoleon 101; and flow of foreign capital 186–7; and free trade 180; hegemony of 197–8, 199; as a hyper-power 208; and international politics 109–10; and international relations 144–5; interventionist strategies 200, 215, 218; and investment income 128; and Iraq 210–12; as largest industrial power 144; as leader/defender of the free world 182; and legal/illegal immigration 216; military factors 102–6, 183, 187–8, 199–200; National Security Strategy 209–10, 212; and the navy 105–6, 109; and oil crisis 186, 187; passivity of 145; and political culture 103; post-war occupations 183–4; power in the 2000s 208–17; precariousness of power 199; Progressivism in 14; and raising of the Continental Army 104–5;

Index

247

refusal to join League of Nations 139; and regime change 210; and Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 205–8; rise of American empire 179–88; role in proxy struggles 178–9; and Second World War 141, 157–8; and self- determination 139–40; social politics 218–20; as society of mass influence 181; soft power of 180–4, 215; and strategic ambition 209–10; and strategic culture 105; strategic overreach 180, 188, 197, 200; strength of 180–1; success of Revolution in 104; tensions with UK 175; territorial gains 140; and undermining of colonial empires 170; and use of slave troops 107; and Vietnam War 175–7, 184–5; vulnerability of 208–9; and war against Japan 162, 164–6; and War Powers Resolution (1973) 185; and warfare limitations 176–7; and Weinberger Doctrine 188 Usuman dan Fodio 101 Vedrine, Hubert 208 Venezuela 215 Vietnam 111, 113, 161, 169, 173, 197, 205 Vietnam War (1963–73) 10, 174, 175–7, 184–5 Vikings 28 Wahhabis 97–8 Walesa, Lech 188 Wanli, Emperor 40 War of the Pacific (1879–83) 9–10 War on Terror 122, 143 Watt, James 93 Wavell, Archibald 162 Weinberger Doctrine 188 Western powers, alliances 133; and ambition 34–5; and annexation of territories 126; anxieties 133; and capabilities 118–19; changes within 118; checked 52–5; and concepts of legitimacy 119; conflicts 54–5, 127; and crises within states 55–60;

Index

248

and economic interests/exchange 121–2, 123–4, 127–30; expansion of 118, 124–7, 131; and free trade 119; and governmental, political, public interest in expansion 121; and international investments 128; and international relations 27; and issues of expansion 61–3; and knowledge 63–5, 118–19; and local cooperation/consent 74, 118, 122–3; and maps 65–9; and military strength 77, 116–17; and nation-state/national empire 136; and nationalist tendencies 133–4; and overstretch 34; post-First World War 139; projection into interior of continents 116; and psychological expansion 119, 121; reaction to 54; relative position (1780–1830) 95–101; setbacks 54; and social structures/cultural assumptions 131–2; and strategic cultures 135; and technological developments 18–19, 67, 118; and Westernization/progress equation 118; winners/losers 132–3, see also named countries e.g. Britain Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 29, 121 Whiskey Rebellion (1794) 108 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 134 Wilkinson, James 103 William III of Orange 73, 86 Wilson, Woodrow 139–40 Wordsworth, William 93 World Bank 180 World Trade Organization (WTO) 218 Xinjiang 159, 192 Yamamoto, Yohji 164 Yellow Sea, Battle of (1592) 40 Yeltsin, Boris 192, 199 Yongzheng emperor 80 Young Turks Movement 116 Yugoslavia 138, 200 Zhang Xueliang 145 Zhui Yuanzhang 32 Zulus 101 Zunghar Confederation 2, 3, 62, 80, 81, 111